'Think so if you choose,' replied Clare, haughtily, as she turned away to conceal how her soft cheek coloured with the excess of her annoyance. By this time Vane, after being entangled by innumerable trains, had made his way to the side of Ida. Jerry Vane was popular in society, and could have had many a girl for the asking. Clare and Ida, too, had often wished--for he was still the dearest of their friends--that he should marry; but they had never suggested it to him, for under the circumstances it would have seemed bad taste, and though he had but one thought--Ida, and Ida only--Jerry Vane went everywhere, and was deemed the gayest of the gay; and now, when their eyes met, there was a kind, sad smile in hers--a smile of the olden time--that took a load off his heart, and still lighter did it grow when, rising, she took his arm--as a widow she could do so now, and said: 'Take me to a cool place; the heat here is stifling, especially in this dark dress; there is a cool seat just within the conservatory door. Thanks, that will do.' Many a picture--many a soft Gainsborough or softer Greuze--may suggest a face as delicate and beautiful as that which was turned up to his; but no picture ever painted by human hand had such a power of expression as that possessed by the face of Ida Beverley, as she sat there, slightly flushed by the heat of the crowded room, and feeling with pleasure the breeze from the great square without blowing on her cheek, and laden with perfumes of fresh flowers as it passed through the long conservatory. The broken ring, the gipsy ring of the dream, rent in two by the cruel tiger's fangs, was now on the marriage finger beside the wedding hoop, as Jerry could see when she drew off her glove, but he was glad to observe that her mourning was becoming lessened by trimmings of grey silk; yet the dark costume, by its contrast to the pallor and purity of her complexion, made Ida seem lovelier than ever, and his heart ached to think that those trappings of woe were worn for a rival. Why did he seek her presence? he was asking himself again. Did some lingering hope inspire him? Without it Jerry felt that it would be madness to place himself within the sphere of her beauty, with their mutual past; yet he could not deny himself the joy of the present, in watching the tenderness of her soft grey-blue eye, the glory of her auburn hair, and the grace of all her actions. She had been the wife of Beverley, true; but the wife of only a few months, and left behind in loneliness while yet a bride. Worried by her sadness, and sick of her repining, selfish old Sir Carnaby had become, unknown to her, somewhat an adherent of her first lover. He was not disinclined to let his widowed daughter become the wife of this unappropriated man, whose good looks and style were as undeniable as his position and expectations. Thus he whispered to Evelyn Desmond that he was not ill-pleased to see them draw apart within the conservatory door.