"May I have the honor of this valse with you?" was spoken in, though not to, Lady Marabout's ear. It was a soft, a rich, a melodious voice enough, and yet Lady Marabout would rather have heard the hiss of a Cobra Capella, for the footmen _might_ have caught the serpent and carried it off from Cecil Ormsby's vicinity, and she couldn't very well tell them to rid the reception-chambers of Chandos Cheveley. Lady Marabout vainly tried to catch Cecil's eye, and warn her of the propriety of an utter and entire repudiation of the valse in question, if there were no "engaged" producible to softly chill the hopes and repulse the advances of the aspirant; but Lady Cecil's soul was obstinately bent saltatory-wards; her chaperone's ocular telegram was lost upon her, and only caught by the last person who should have seen it, who read the message off the wires to his own amusement, but naturally was not magnanimous enough to pass it on. "I ought to have warned her never to dance with that detestable man. If I could but have caught her eye even now!" thought Lady Marabout, restlessly. The capella _would_ have been much the more endurable of the two; the serpent couldn't have passed its arm round Rosediamond's priceless daughter and whirled her down the ball-room to the music of Coote and Timney's band, as Chandos Cheveley was now doing. "Why did _you_ not ask her for that waltz, Philip?" cried the good lady, almost petulantly. Carruthers opened his eyes wide. "My dear mother, you know I never dance! I come to balls to oblige my hostesses and look at the women, but not to carry a seven-stone weight of tulle illusion and white satin, going at express pace, with the thermometer at 80 deg., and a dense crowd jostling one at every turn in the circle. _Bien obligé!_ that's not my idea of pleasure; if it were the Pyrrhic dance, now, or the Tarantella, or the Bolero, under a Castilian chestnut-tree----" "Hold your tongue! You might have danced for once, just to have kept her from Chandos Cheveley." "From the best waltzer in London? Not so selfish. Ask Amandine's wife if women don't like to dance with that fellow!" "I should be very sorry to mention his name to her, or any of her set," responded Lady Marabout, getting upon certain virtuous stilts of her own, which she was given to mount on rare occasion and at distant intervals, always finding them very uncomfortable and unsuitable elevations, and being as glad to cast them off as a traveller to kick off the _échasses_ he has had to strap on over the sandy plains of the Landes.