After all the domino, as proved by continental patronage, and by its invariable use on the part of those who had covert designs to prosecute at this or any other masquerade, was the one sufficient and safe disguise in which men and women could glide here and there, and appear and disappear miraculously in the crowd. But wearers of dominoes who wished to be known, must wait for the late hour when every guest was to remove his or her mask, and step forth in proper identity. Captain Fane’s temper was not his strong point, and his disposition was not accommodating. He was too ruffled and piqued to receive any comfort from the prospect of a humiliating confession of defeat, and a petition for mercy. In the meantime, if her vexed partner could have known it, poor Lady Bell was not enjoying this masquerade, to which she had looked forward with keen, girlish zest and a softer interest. She had the sore humiliation—granted it was by her own fault—to be recognised by a multitude of her set, of Mrs. Lascelles’ friends and of Lady Bell’s danglers, and yet to remain unrecognised by the one man whose recognition she craved. Lady Bell had dressed herself as a gipsy fortune-teller, in a remarkably respectable rustic gown—for a gipsy, in the authentic red cloak and kerchief over her head, with a pack of incorrectly clean cards. But, unfortunately, fortune-telling, though not so plentiful as blackberries or dominoes, abounded to the degree that Captain Fane, himself undistinguished, passed at a little distance without eliciting a spark of the magnetic influence, the very woman who was swaying him in spite of his reason, and almost of his conscience, who was filling him with a strong, untrained heart’s concentrated love, which in contrast with the calculating spent loves of the jaded hearts around, was fit to work like madness in the brain. Lady Bell was greatly chagrined, half angry with Captain Fane for being horribly, unaccountably stupid, half doubtful, with a pang, if he who continued hidden from her, as she from him, was really in the room. Something might have happened, a sudden appointment to a ship, an accident—his being stopped, and wounded as well as robbed, on his way to the ball—or a malicious story heard to her discredit, for he was precise in his notions, and stern in upholding them, as she knew from her experience at the water-party. Sailors had two standing-points from which they regarded women. The one standing-point was that of coarser salt-water Lovelaces and Lotharios, to whom no woman was sacred, and who trusted none. The other was that of Turks, who locked up their women in western harems, and exacted from the women the meekest domesticity. Harry Fane was no profligate Lovelace, Lady Bell was sure; but she was not equally certain that he might not develop into a rigid, caustic captain of his own household.