Mabel had not the air of one whose heart is bruised or torn. That she had gained in queenliness within the past year was not evidence of austerity or the callousness that ensues upon the healing of a wound. The Ayletts were a stately race, and the few who, while she was in her teens, had carped at her lack of pride because of her disposition to choose friends from the walks of life lower than her own, and criticised as unbecoming the playful familiarity that caused underlings and plebeians--the publicans and sinners of the aristocrat's creed--to worship the ground on which she trod--the censors in the court of etiquette conferred upon her altered demeanor the patent of their approbation, averring, for the thousandth time, that good blood would assert itself in the long run and bring forth the respectable fruits of refinement, self-appreciation, and condescension. The change had come over her by perceptible, but not violent, stages of progression, dating--Mrs. Sutton saw with pain; Rosa, with enforced respect--from the sunset hour in which she had read her brother's sentence of condemnation upon her then betrothed, now estranged, lover. After that one evening, she had not striven to conceal herself and her hurt in solitude. Neither had she borrowed from desperation a brazen helmet to hide the forehead the cruel letter had, for a brief space, laid low in the dust of anguished humiliation. If a whisper of her disappointment and the attendant incidents crept through the ranks of her associates, it died away for want of confirmation in her clear level-lidded eyes, elastic footfall and the willingness and frequency with which she appeared and played her part in the various scenes of gayety that made the winter succeeding her brother's marriage one long to be remembered by the pleasure-seekers of the vicinity. She had not disdained the assistance of her sister-in-law's judgment and experience in the choice of the dresses that were to grace these merry-makings, and, thanks to her own naturally excellent taste, now tacitly disputed the palm of elegant attire with that lady. Her Christmas costume, which, in many others of her age, would have been objected to by critical fashionists, as old-maidish and grave, yet set off her pale complexion--none of the Ayletts were rosy after they reached man's or woman's estate--and heightened her distingue bearing into regal grace. Yet it was only a heavy black silk, rich and glossy as satin, cut, as was then the universal rule of evening dress, tolerably low in the neck, with short sleeves; bunches of pomegranate-blossoms and buds for breast and shoulder-knots, and among the classic braids of her dark hair a half-wreath of the same.