turn to begin to feel uneasy, when he saw Roger’s face. There was a savage scowl upon it; no holiday expression, but one of the darkest anger and displeasure. He looked neither right nor left, but marched straight to the piano, seated himself, and struck some chords, as if to try the instrument; then sat and waited. Michael consulted his programme, and found that the piece was a duet for soprano and contralto, and that the singers were Miss Wynter and Miss Ada Dixon. For the first time he began to connect Eleanor’s anxious look, and Roger’s angry expression with the words Mrs. Johnson had spoken about Otho and Magdalen having gone together into the little room where the performers waited. At that moment there was more clapping, and then appeared what seemed to Michael the key to both the black frown and the anxious looks which he had seen. From the room which opened on to the platform, and where they had been waiting, emerged three persons. First came Ada Dixon, who, as soprano, took precedence, and leading her by the hand in the most approved fashion, and with every manifestation of devotion, admiration, and respect, Otho Askam, who, all the time that he led the girl forward, was stooping towards her, and saying something that caused her to simper, and mince her steps in a manner at once gratified, nervous, and self-important. The nervousness was quite visible, but the gratification and self-importance outweighed it. Ada evidently felt herself a star of the first magnitude—the personage of the evening, and was swelling with conscious pride in thus being singled out for honourable distinction. Michael at first only saw the broadly farcical side of the affair, and was inclined to burst into a shout of laughter; but, as these two first figures advanced to the front, and the other became fully visible, he at once began to realise that there was a very different side to the picture, and that it might prove anything but a laughing matter to those concerned.