Beautiful and gorgeous were the dresses thus emerging for an instant under the red glare of torchlight, to disappear through the folding-doors within. Shimmering the satin, and sparkling with jewels, the loveliest women of the capital passed in review for three paces before the populace, little loth, perhaps, to submit their toilets to the scientific criticism of a Parisian crowd, a criticism that reached, however, no higher than the chin, for every one of those fair French faces was hidden in a black mask. Their gallants, on the contrary, came unprovided with these defences, and the male bird, indeed, though without question the uglier animal, was on the present occasion equal in brilliancy of plumage to his mate. It is, however, with the interior that we have to do; behind the folding-doors that swallowed up these radiant visions in succession so greedily. That interior was flooded in a warm yellow light. A hundred glittering lustres shone and twinkled at narrow intervals, to stud the curves of white and gold and crimson that belted the ample circle of the building, while high in the centre of its dome an enormous chandelier flashed and gleamed and dazzled, like some gigantic diamond shivered into a thousand prismatic fragments. From roof to flooring fresh bright colours bloomed in the boxes, as bloom the posies on a flower-stall; while pit, stage, and orchestra, boarded to a level, had become a shifting sea of brilliant hues, whirling, coiling, undulating, ebbing, flowing, surging into a foam of light and snowy plumes, bearing in turn each colour of the rainbow to its surface—flashing and glistening through all its waters with a blaze of gems and gold. Captain George was wading about in it, more preoccupied and less inclined to take advantage of its gaieties than a musketeer usually found himself in such a scene of revelry. His distinguished air and manly bearing drew on him, indeed, gibes and taunts, half-raillery, half-compliment, from many a rosy mouth smiling under its black mask; but to these he answered not a word. He was unlike himself to-night—dull, abstracted, and out of spirits. Even Bras-de-Fer, he felt, would have composed and propounded his heaviest retorts in less time than it took his captain to understand any one of the jests levelled at a taciturnity so out of place. He was in no mood for banter, nor intrigue, nor amusement—not even for supper. He wanted to see Cerise; he confessed it to himself without reserve, yet he neither expected nor wished to find her in such a scene as this.