The drawing-room was very bright and very gay that evening--like a scene in a play, John was tempted to think. There was a great deal of music, and he sat in his corner and looked and saw everything, and would have been amused had he felt no special interest in it. Kate was in the very centre of it all, guiding and directing, as it was natural she should be. The spectator in the corner watched her by the piano, now taking a part, now accompanying, now throwing herself back into her chair with an air of relief when something elaborate had been set agoing, and whispering and smiling behind her fan to some favoured being, though never to himself. At one moment his vague pain in watching her rose to a positive pang. It was when Fred Huntley was the person with whom she talked. He was stooping down over her, leaning on the back of a chair, and Kate’s face was raised to him and half screened with her fan. Their talk looked very confidential, very animated and friendly; and it seemed to John (but that must have been a mistake) that she gave him just the tips of her fingers as she dismissed him. Fred rose from the chair on which he had been half kneeling with a little movement of his head, which Kate reciprocated, and went off upon a meandering passage round the room. She had given him some commission, John felt--to him, and not to me, he said bitterly in his heart, and then tried to comfort himself, not very successfully, with the words she had taught him, “After all, she is my Kate and not his.” Was she John’s? or was it all a dream and phantasmagoria, that might vanish in an instant and leave no trace behind? He covered his eyes with his hand for a second in the sickness of jealous love with which he was struggling; but when he looked up again, found that a new revelation waited him, harder than anything he had yet had to undergo. It was that Fred Huntley was approaching himself, and that the mission with which Kate, giving him the tips of her fingers, had intrusted the man to whom of all others he felt most antagonistic, concerned himself. Fred managed the business very cleverly, and would have taken in any unsuspicious person; but John, on the contrary, was horribly suspicious, looking for pricks at all possible points. The ambassador threw himself into a vacant chair which happened to be handy, and stretched himself out comfortably in it, and said nothing for a minute. Then he yawned (was that, too, done on purpose?) and turned to John. “Were you asleep, Mitford?” he said; “I don’t much wonder. It’s very amusing, but it’s very monotonous night after night.” “I have not had so much of it as you have, to get so tired,” said John.