The season was at its height, and all London seemed abandoned to the pursuit of pleasure, almost as completely as the gay capital of France in its normal condition;--all London, that is to say, except the few hundreds of thousands who were suffering, dying, bearing all the ills and miseries of life, unseen and unheard by their more fortunate brethren, for whom the hour of calamity had not yet sounded. Among the most fashionable of the fashionable _réunions_ fixed for one brilliant night in June,--a night on which the fields and trees, the rivers and the gardens, were bathed in moonlight, and fanned by warm perfumed air; a night on which all nature was wrapped in a trance of delight,--was Mrs. Pendarvis's ball. Her ball _par excellence_, be it observed; for she "opened her rooms" for dancing and music, for charades and kettledrums, for every conceivable purpose for which people could be gathered together, a most satisfactory number of times during the season. But this was a grand, an exceptional occasion,--a yearly event, which found record in the chronicles of the doings of the magnates of society, and formed an epoch in the history of each successive year. Katharine Streightley and her husband were going to this ball. Miss Guyon had never missed the grand occasion since she had been "out," and its last recurrence had been memorable to her. She remembered it well as she sat under her maid's hands, and suffered herself to be attired far more splendidly than usual. She took a secret pleasure in forcing upon her own attention the contrast between the past and the present on this night. When her toilet was an accomplished fact, she stood before her glass and gazed upon her radiant figure, clothed in the richest white satin, and decorated with the valuable and quaintly-set diamonds which had been her mother's sole legacy to her, and a thrill of irrepressible triumph ran through her whole frame. She felt her own beauty as she had never felt it before; and she acknowledged that it was very pleasant to have the means of adorning it so lavishly, of adding so much to its power. Her toilet-table was covered with cases in which gems of great value and beauty were nestled away in green-velvet niches, or displayed boastfully upon backgrounds of satin; but she had left them all undisturbed; her mother's diamonds should be her only ornaments that night. She desired her maid to bring more lights, and set them about the room, so as to show her her own figure in every point of view. The woman obeyed, with some surprise: this was not like Mrs. Streightley, who, though inordinately extravagant, was not practically vain, with the kind of vanity which impresses itself upon the attention of a waiting-woman.