A second after, and Arthur had dropped his opera-glass; it rolled back into the box, and he went back for it. There was no change in Kitty Farnum’s attitude; she was still leaning on the chair, but looking at Lord Birmingham: her face cold and fixed, like some scornful face of stone. She gave her arm to Arthur and walked out. CHAPTER XVI. IN MAIDEN MEDITATION. Gracie was sitting alone in her own room; she had been reading--the “Faery Queene” the book--but it had slipped from her hand--and now she was thinking. Not of herself, but of others; Arthur, perhaps, principally. For she had given her heart to him; and in a perfect maidenly love there is always some foretaste of the maternal, a fond solicitude as of a mother for her child. Perhaps even Arthur did not know how much she thought of him: and Mrs. Livingstone was too much bound up in Mamie, and Mamie too much in herself, to notice it; Miss Brevier alone had seen it, and had held her peace. Gracie fancied that no one knew it, save Arthur himself; though for her and Arthur it had changed the world. The world itself she did not understand; all things did not look clear to her that winter; the people of her acquaintance puzzled her. It almost seemed as if she would not have their sympathy in all ways; but this could not be proven, for Gracie never made a confidante. Now Mamie Livingstone, on the other hand, confided everything to her; and then, apparently, forgot it all, much as a Parisian lady may be supposed to forget the substance of her last auricular confession; for Gracie noted a certain repugnancy or incoherence in this young woman’s heart history of which the heart’s possessor was unaware entirely. Mamie was intensely a metropolitan girl; the exquisitely sensitive product of a great social nerve-centre. She did not know her Emerson, and was wholly untroubled with “the whichness of the why:” but she had mastered her own environment at an early age. And she had--except, of course, as against young men, her natural prey--a frank disposition and a warm heart.