I may be pardoned this little digression, as it serves to explain in some measure how I felt on entering the splendidly lit up _salons_ of the villa, crowded with hundreds of figures in all the varied costumes of a carnival,--the sounds of laughter mingled with the crash of the music; the hurrying hither and thither of servants with refreshments; the crowds gathered around fortune-tellers, whose predictions threw the parties at each moment into shouts of merriment; the eager following of some disappointed domino, interrogating every one to find out a lost mask. For some time I stood an astonished spectator at the kind of secret intelligence which seemed to pervade the whole assemblage, when suddenly a mask, who for some time had been standing beside me, whispered in French,-- “If you pass your time in this manner, you must not feel surprised if your place be occupied.” I turned hastily round, but she was gone. She, I say, for the voice was clearly a woman’s; her pink domino could be no guide, for hundreds of the same color passed me every instant. The meaning of the allusion I had little doubt of. I turned to speak to Power, but he was gone; and for the first moment of my life, the bitterness of rivalry crossed my mind. It was true I had resigned all pretensions in his favor. My last meeting with Lucy had been merely to justify my own character against an impression that weighed heavily on me; still, I thought he might have waited,--another day and I should be far away, neither to witness nor grieve over his successes. “You still hesitate,” whispered some one near me. I wheeled round suddenly, but could not detect the speaker, and was again relapsing into my own musings, when the same voice repeated,-- “The white domino with the blue cape. Adieu.” Without waiting to reflect upon the singularity of the occurrence, I now hurried along through the dense crowd, searching on every side for the domino. “Isn’t that O’Malley?” said an Englishman to his friend. “Yes,” replied the other; “the very man we want. O’Malley, find a partner; we have been searching a _vis-à-vis_ this ten minutes.” The speaker was an officer I had met at Sir George Dashwood’s. “How did you discover me?” said I, suddenly. “Not a very difficult thing if you carry your mask in your hand that way,” was the answer. And I now perceived that in the distraction of my thoughts I had been carrying my mask in this manner since my coming into the room. “There now, what say you to the blue domino? I saw her foot, and a girl with such an instep must be a waltzer.”