The carriage, after many tantalising halts opposite dark laurels, draws up finally before a blaze of electric light, a crowd of powdered footmen, an arching of palm-boughs; and milady steps deliberately out in her fur boots and her diamond 'fender,' followed by her two _protégées_. Freddy is not at the door to receive them; and the moment that she has discovered this fact, Prue sees the irrationality of the hope that had led her ever to expect that he would be. He is naturally not in the cloak-room, where milady seems, to the girl's passionate impatience, to loiter unconscionably long, tugging at the strings of her _sortie de bal_, which have got into a knot, and talking to the numerous friends she meets there. To do her justice, it is not any care for her toilette that detains her. She would quite as soon have the famous tiara--her 'fender,' as she always calls it--which the county has admired for fifty years, on crooked as straight. The county expects to see it on great occasions, and so she puts it on; but if Mrs. Mason were to dispose it behind before, the circumstance would disturb but very slightly her lady's equanimity. Mr. Ducane is not, as far as can be made out by a first glance, in the magnificent music-room, to-night arranged as a theatre, and at whose door Mrs. Hartley stands, smiling and splendid, to receive her guests. But though Prue's eye has as yet to fast from the sight of her betrothed, her ear at least is gladdened by his praises. 'Oh, Lady Roupell, I do not know how we ever can thank Mr. Ducane enough!' she hears Mrs. Hartley exclaim. 'My girls say they do not know what they should have done without him--so kind, so clever, and unselfish is not the word!' Milady grunts. 'No, I do not think it is,' she says, half _sotto voce_, as she passes on. At the first look, the room, superb as are its proportions, seems already full; but a closer inspection reveals at the upper end several still vacant rows of arm-chairs, reserved by the host and hostess for those among their guests whom they most delight to honour. To this favoured category belongs milady, and she is presently installed with her two young friends by a _sémillant_ papa Hartley, in the very middle of the front rank. For the present, nothing can be easier than for Prue to keep the chair at her side vacant. She has already anxiously and surreptitiously spread her white frock over it. Each of earth's glories has probably its attendant disadvantages; a warm and consoling doctrine for those to whose share not much of life's gilding falls; nor is a seat in the front row of synagogue or playhouse any exception to this rule. It has the inevitable drawback, that except by an uncomfortable contortion of the neck-muscles, it is impossible for its occupants to see what is going on in the body of the room; and the view of foot-lights and a drop-scene is one that after a while is apt to pall.