"I find that I am engaged for one more waltz," she says, carelessly. "I suppose you do not object to my dancing that? It would be embarrassing to excuse myself." "Your partner is--whom?" he inquires, with a slight frown. Again she consults her programme. "It is Mr. Penn." "Cannot you excuse yourself? Say you are tired? Your head aches? Women know how to invent suitable excuses always--do they not?" "I will do as you wish, sir," she answers, in so low a voice that he does not catch its faint inflection of scorn. Other promenaders come out on the piazza, and one or two laughing jests are thrown at him for keeping the "belle of the ball away from her proper sphere." "Perhaps I _am_ selfish," he says. "Let us return to the ball-room, my love." "As you please," she answers. He leads her back and lingers by her side awhile, then it strikes him that _les proprietes_ do not sanction a man's monopolizing his wife's company in society. With a sigh he leaves her, and tries to make himself agreeable to other fair women. He has hardly left her before the band strikes up "The Beautiful Blue Danube," and Byron Penn starts up from some remote corner, from which he has witnessed her return to the ball-room. "This is our waltz, is it not?" he says, with a tremor of pleasure in his voice. A slight flush rises over Bonnibel's cheek. "I believe it is," she answers; "but if you will not think me very rude, Mr. Penn, I am going to ask you to excuse me from it. I am tired and shall dance no more this evening." "You are very cruel," says the poet, plaintively; "but if you wish to atone for your injustice you will walk down to the shore with me and look at the moonlight on the sea, and hear how delicious the music sounds down there. You can form no conception of its sweetness when mellowed by a little distance and blent with the solemn diapason of the waves." "If you will go and tell my maid to bring me a shawl," she answers, indifferently, "I will go with you for a minute." He returns with a fleecy white wrap, and they stroll away from the "dancers dancing in tune." CHAPTER XX. Colonel Carlyle soon misses his heart's fair queen from the ball-room, and immediately the whole enchanting scene becomes a desert in his love-lorn eyes. He glances hither and thither; he wanders disconsolately around, yet no flitting glimpse of his snow-maiden rewards his eager eyes. She has vanished as completely from his sight as if a sunbeam had shone down upon and dissolved her into a mist. "Have you seen Bonnibel anywhere?" he inquires of Felise, meeting her on her partner's arm as he wandered around. Felise looks up with a low, malicious laugh. "Bonnibel?" she says. "Oh, yes; she and Byron Penn have been down on the beach this half hour in the moonlight, composing sonnets."