A great assemblage of pretentious and grotesque figures, who for the most part could do little else to assume foreign and cast-off native characters, strutted, stalked, shambled, stamped, bawled, growled, and squeaked amidst a chorus of loud remarks, shouts of laughter, and roars of derision. Communication between all save the initiated was next to impossible. Lady Bell and Captain Fane lost themselves, and what was worse, could not find each other, incontinently, and in spite of the magnet which each formed for the other, and the conclusive test which each believed he or she could apply to the other. “This is the very paradise of fools,” thought the not very tolerant sailor, as he elbowed his way along, and doggedly resisted the audacious attack on his notice made in very wantonness, or on mistaken premises. “No, I won’t ogle that intolerable shepherdess, Lady Bell never perpetrated such a crook. “If Columbus keep raking me with his glass, as if I sailed in command of his ship’s consort, I’ll be tempted to give him a knock on the head with his own telescope. He sail a carvel or discover new lands! He is only fit for the tub of that Diogenes which Dick Turpin has kicked over! “What a game for grown men and women! All the rank, wealth, and intelligence of England engaged in it, as the news prints will have it to-morrow. “Where on earth can Lady Bell be? She is not that fair one with the locks of gold—borrowed locks clearly—over her own dark hair. No, this lady is several inches too tall, and she walks like a stork, instead of footing it like a fairy. “Crossing the line is a joke to this. The Jack Tars have more point in their gambols. Avast! Yonder goes Neptune with his trident, summoned by my words from the vasty deep. But I’ll have none of him. I have enough of him on his own element, to be let off from the contact here. “Lady Bell is not walking in the minuet. What does she mean by thus giving me the slip? How do I know what harm she may be running into in the confounded freedom of this masquerade? All the rage is for adventures, pleasant or unpleasant. I suppose every pretty woman will be mortally disappointed if she do not have her share. Oh heavens! the folly of women, and oh heavens! the folly of men—of a pretended Timon in a shabby blue jacket for thinking to mend them.” But Captain Fane was not there in a blue jacket, shabby or otherwise, else he might not have sought far and wide in vain. He had, between ignorance and a spice of spite at Lady Bell, because she would not afford him a clue to her character for the evening, taken no more distinctive disguise than one of the abounding black dominoes or loose cloaks, of which there were scores in the room, worn by lazy, shy, or proud men and women, many of the former of much the same height as Captain Fane.