The ladies perhaps feared a hoax of some sort, and would not ask to see the letter; and then Hoskins recognized his failure to play upon their curiosity with a laugh, and gave the letter to Mrs. Elmore. It was an invitation to a mask ball, of which all Venice had begun to speak. A great Russian lady, who had come to spend the winter in the Lagoons, and had taken a whole floor at one of the hotels, had sent out her cards, apparently to all the available people in the city, for the event which was to take place a fortnight later. In the mean time, a thrill of preparation was felt in various quarters, and the ordinary course of life was interrupted in a way that gave some idea of the old times, when Venice was the capital of pleasure, and everything yielded there to the great business of amusement. Mrs. Elmore had found it impossible to get a pair of fine shoes finished until after the ball; a dress which Lily had ordered could not be made; their laundress had given notice that for the present all fluting and quilling was out of the question; one already heard that the chief Venetian perruquier and his assistants were engaged for every moment of the forty-eight hours before the ball, and that whoever had him now must sit up with her hair dressed for two nights at least. Mrs. Elmore had a fanatical faith in these stories; and while agreeing with her husband, as a matter of principle, that mask balls were wrong, and that it was in bad taste for a foreigner to insult the sorrow of Venice by a festivity of the sort at such a time, she had secretly indulged longings which the sight of Hoskins's invitation rendered almost insupportable. Her longings were not for herself, but for Lily: if she could provide Lily with the experience of a masquerade in Venice, she could overpay all the kindnesses that the Mayhews had ever done her. It was an ambition neither ignoble nor ungenerous, and it was with a really heroic effort that she silenced it in passing the invitation to her husband, and simply saying to Hoskins, "Of course you will go." "I don't know about that," he answered. "That's the point I want some advice on. You see this document calls for a lady to fill out the bill." "Oh," returned Mrs. Elmore, "you will find some Americans at the hotels. You can take them." "Well, now, I was thinking, Mrs. Elmore, that I should like to take you." "Take me!" she echoed tremulously. "What an idea! I'm too old to go to mask balls." "You don't look it," suggested Hoskins. "Oh, I couldn't go," she sighed. "But it's very, very kind." Hoskins dropped his head, and gave the low chuckle with which he confessed any little bit of humbug. "Well, you _or_ Miss Lily." Lily had retired to the other side of the room as soon as the parley about the invitation began. Without asking or seeing, she knew what was in the note, and now she felt it right to make a feint of not knowing what Mrs. Elmore meant when she asked, "What do _you_ say, Lily?"