"That," observed the pretty Southern matron, "is conside'd ve'y bad luck. When I was a young girl I once peeped into the glass over my ole mammy's shoulder, and she said I'd sho'ly be punished befo' the year was done." "And were you?" "I don't exactly remember," said Mrs. Craig demurely, "but I think I first met my husband the ve'y next day." They both laughed softly, looking at each other in the mirror. So, in her gown of rosy muslin, bouffant and billowy, a pink flower in her hair, and Celia's pink-and-white cameo at her whiter throat Ailsa Paige descended the carpeted stairs and came into the mellow dimness of the front parlour, where there was much rosewood, and a French carpet, and glinting prisms on the chandeliers,--and a young man, standing, dark against a bar of sunshine in which golden motes swam. "How do you do," she said, offering her narrow hand, and: "Mrs. Craig is dressing to receive you. . . . It is warm for April, I think. How amiable of you to come all the way over from New York. Mr. Craig and his son Stephen are at business, my cousins, Paige and Marye, are at school. Won't you sit down?" She had backed away a little distance from him, looking at him under brows bent slightly inward, and thinking that she had made no mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian. Upright against the doorway, she suddenly recollected with a blush that she was staring like a schoolgirl, and sat down. And he drew up a chair before her and seated himself; and then under the billowy rose crinoline she set her pretty feet close together, folded her hands, and looked at him with a smiling composure which she no longer really felt. "The weather," she repeated, "is unusually warm. Do you think that Major Anderson will hold out at Sumter? Do you think the fleet is going to relieve him? Dear me," she sighed, "where will it all end, Mr. Berkley?" "In war," he said, also smiling; but neither of them believed it, or, at the moment, cared. There were other matters impending--since their first encounter. "I have thought about you a good deal since Camilla's theatre party," he said pleasantly. "Have you?" She scarcely knew what else to say--and regretted saying anything. "Indeed I have. I dare not believe you have wasted as much as one thought on the man you danced with once--and refused ever after." She felt, suddenly, a sense of uneasiness in being near him. "Of course I have remembered you, Mr. Berkley," she said with composure. "Few men dance as well. It has been an agreeable memory to me." "But you would not dance with me again." "I--there were--you seemed perfectly contented to sit out--the rest--with me." He considered the carpet attentively. Then looking up with quick, engaging smile: