The signal, after a short respite, devoted to fruits, ices, &c., was made for the dancers, and William Edgerton rose. I noted his bow to my wife, saw that he spoke, and necessarily concluded, that he again solicited her to dance. Her lips moved--she bowed slightly--and he again took his seat beside her. I inferred from this that she declined to dance a second time. She was certainly more prudent than himself. I assigned to prudence--to policy--on her part, what might well have been placed to a nobler motive. I went further. “She will not dance with him,” said the busy fiend at my shoulder, “for the very reason that she prefers a quiet seat beside him. In the dance they mingle with others; they can not speak with so much ease and safety. Now she has him all to herself.” I dashed away, forgetful, gloomily, from the knot by which I had been encompassed. I passed into the adjoining room, which was connected by folding doors, with that I left. The crowd necessarily grouped itself around the dancers, and (sic) a window-jamb, I stood absolutely forgetting where I was alone among the many--with my eye stretching over the heads of the flying masses, to the remote spot where my wife still sat with Edgerton. I was aroused from my hateful dream by a slight touch upon my arm. I started with a painful sense of my own weakness--with a natural dread that the secret misery under which I labored was no longer a secret. I writhed under the conviction that the cold, the sneering, and the worthless, were making merry with my afflictions. I met the gaze of the bride--the mistress of ceremonies--my wife's mother Mrs. Delaney, late Clifford. I shuddered as I beheld her glance. I could not mistake the volume of meaning in her smile--that wretched smile of her thin, withered lips, brimful of malignant cunning, which said emphatically as such smile could say:-- “I see you on the rack; I know that you are writhing; and I enjoy your tortures.” I started, as if to leave her, with a look of fell defiance, roused, ready to burst forth into utterance, upon my own face. But she gently detained my arm. “You are troubled.” “No.” “Ah! but you are. Stop awhile. You will feel better.” “Thank you; but I feel very well.” “No, no, you do not. You can not deceive me. I know where the shoe pinches; but what did you expect? Were you simple enough to imagine that a woman would be true to her husband, who was false to her own mother?” “Fiend!” I muttered in her ear. “Ha! ha! ha!” was the unmeasured response of the bel dame, loud enough for the whole house to hear. I darted from her grasp, which would have detained me still, made my way--how I know not--out of the house, and found myself almost gasping for breath, in the open air of the street. She, at least, had been sagacious enough to find out my secret CHAPTER XXVII KINGSLEY.