The ball terminated as brilliantly as it had begun; and Katharine was the gayest of the gay, the brightest of the bright. She stayed very late, and she danced incessantly. Again and again she found herself close to Gordon Frere, and once she was so placed that she had to choose between speaking to him and "cutting him dead." She took counsel of her pride; she remembered that if, as seemed likely, he was remaining in London, she must necessarily meet him often, and she decided on speaking to him. They were on the staircase, she going down, he coming up, with Hester on his arm,--he had danced several times with her that night, as Katharine had remarked,--when she bowed to him, and said, "How do you do, Mr. Frere? Have you been long in town?" "A few days only, Mrs. Streightley. I hope Mr. Guyon is well?" "Quite well, thank you." Again she bowed, and passed him; and thus they met and parted, who, when last they met, had parted with the brightest and most blessed hope which ever gilds life for youth and love. Robert and Katharine drove home in silence, which each hoped might be imputed by the other to fatigue. With her remembrance was busy, with him remorse and shame. CHAPTER VIII. MARRIED FOR LOVE. Mrs. Streightley met Gordon Frere frequently during the remainder of the month of June. She met him at balls and dinner-parties, at fêtes and promenades, and riding in the Park. She was distantly civil on these occasions; and he carefully, but reluctantly, modelled his demeanour on hers. "She is so awfully stiff and standoffish," he would say to himself, when Katharine had bowed to him coldly or spoken in a tone of icy indifference; "it seems almost as if she couldn't forgive herself. I'm sure I forgive her; more than that,--by Jove! I'm very much obliged to her. We should both have been up a tree by this time if we had been married, Treasury appointment notwithstanding. What a beauty she is, though! and Streightley's not half a bad fellow either, though we used to make such fun of him. 'The City man' she called him, like a deceitful minx as she was, and she going to marry him all the time! However, I must not think of that, or I shall be getting angry again." And from this soliloquy, and from others like it, in which he indulged, it would appear that Mr. Gordon Frere's sentiments were not of the deep and lasting order, and that his friend Yeldham had formed a tolerably correct estimate of his character. He was of that constitution, and at that time of life, when a few months seem like an eternity; and he had come back to London fancy-free, and if a little wiser, a little more capable of acting from interested motives, not materially corrupted. He would not, probably, allow himself to fall in love with any woman for the future whom it would be imprudent to marry; but neither would he marry any woman, no matter how rich, whom he could not love.