The lamps were lighted and most of her guests were in the room amusing themselves in various fashions. She missed Mr. Revington, but the tinkle of his inevitable guitar came to her from the balcony. She went out and found him pouring out a plaintive love-song into the unappreciative ears of Irene. At the appearance of her hostess the girl effected a precipitate escape into the house, leaving her lover to finish his ditty to the desert air. Mrs. Stuart went up to his side and laid her hand on his arm. "Julius, I wish to speak to you," she said, in a low, strange voice. The strings twanged discordantly under his hand. He looked up with something like a guilty start. "Now?" he asked. "Of course not," impatiently, "but as soon as possible. Can we manage a private meeting?" "_I_ can, of course," he answered, with an emphasis on the pronoun. "The risk is yours, not mine. What can you have to say to me?" The impatient, almost insolent tone in which he addressed her, sent the hot blood to her face. "You take a high tone," she breathed in suppressed anger. "Pardon me," he replied, with a fine latent sarcasm in his tone that angered her yet more. But she kept down her seething resentment with a powerful effort of will. "Can you come out into the grounds to-night? I have something very important to speak about. I can slip out unnoticed about eleven o'clock," she whispered. "I will come," he replied, laconically. She named a place for meeting, then returned to her guests in the drawing-room. Her glance, full of envenomed hate and deadly malice, fell on Irene. The girl was standing at an open window half-hidden by the falling drapery of the lace curtains, her beautiful, sad young face turned toward the sky. She was looking wondrously lovely in her simple, white mull dress with a great cluster of purple golden-hearted pansies nestled in the filmy lace at her throat, and the veil of her golden hair half hiding the slim, graceful form. Mrs. Stuart wondered at the air of deep sadness that marked the girlish face and caused that pathetic droop of the rosy lips. How little she dreamed that the girl she hated so jealously was thinking of one dead in the cruel sea as she stood there watching the starry constellations of Heaven sparkling through the misty veil of night. She did not dream what mournful thoughts filled the young heart nor how sadly Irene murmured over to herself some plaintive words that seemed to fit her melancholy vein: "Ships are tossing at sea, And ships sail in to the windy cliffs of the shore; But the ship that is dearest to me Will never come in with the tide-- Will ripple the bay no more, Riding in with the tide."