No record exists of the skating of the goddess Diana, but had she skated, Lily might have served as her model. Just so might she have swept over the ice with mazy motion, ever and ever throwing herself off her balance, just as surely to regain it. As for Arend Van Voorst, he skated like Harold Hardrada, of whose performances in that line we have not been left in ignorance. "It must be his Dutch blood," commented Miss Morgan. Ada Thorne, meanwhile, was skating contentedly enough under the escort of the lion second in degree--Prescott Avery, just returned from his journey round the world, about which he had written a magazine article, and was understood to be projecting a book. His thin but well-preserved flaxen locks, whitey-brown moustache, and little piping voice were unchanged by tropic heats or Alpine snows, but he had gained in consequence and, though mild and unassuming, felt it. He had always been in the habit of entertaining his fair friends with a number of pretty tales drawn from his varied social experiences, and had acquired a fresh stock of very exciting ones in his travels. But his present hearer's attention was wandering, and her smiles unmeaning, and in the very midst of a most interesting narrative about his encounter with an angry llama, she put an aimless question that showed utter ignorance whether it took place in China or Peru. Prescott, always amiable, gulped down his mortification with the aid of a cough, and then followed the lady's gaze to where the distant flash of a scarlet toque might be seen through the thin, leafless bushes on a low spur of land. "That is Lily Carey, is it not?" he asked. "How very handsome she is looking to-day! She has grown even more beautiful than when I went away. By-the-by, is that the gentleman she is engaged to?" "Oh, dear, no! Why, that is Arend Van Voorst! Don't you know him? She is engaged to a Mr. Ponsonby, an English settler in South Australia." "I see now that it is Mr. Van Voorst, whom I met several times before I left," said Prescott, with unfailing amiability even under a snubbing. Then, cheered by the prospect of again taking the superior position, he continued in an impressive tone: "But it is not astonishing that I should have taken him for Mr. Ponsonby. I believe I had the pleasure of meeting that gentleman in Melbourne when I was in Australia, and the resemblance is striking, especially at a little distance." "Did you, indeed?" asked Ada, inwardly burning with excitement, but outwardly nonchalant. The remarkable extent of Miss Thorne's knowledge of everyone's affairs was not gained by direct questioning, which she had found defeated its own object. "It is rather odd you should have happened to meet him in Melbourne, for he very seldom goes there, and lives on a ranch in quite another part of Australia."