The girl’s sweet voice--at first full of playfulness and merriment--had grown tender and earnest with the utterance of the last words, and she came toward her father with hands extended as if to embrace him; but Oscar Hilton repulsed her almost rudely. “Go to the reception by all means, Iris, and don’t be so silly and childish. I am expecting a visitor just now, and cannot be bothered. Say to Isabel that I will see her when she comes back from Mrs. Laurier’s. I have writing to do to-night, and shall not have retired.” Iris Hilton bowed, and turned from her father without a word, but the sweet, girlish face had lost all its look of brightness, and the pretty lips quivered piteously while she went to do his bidding. Mr. Hilton seemed to breathe more freely when she was gone, and it would have been hard to fathom the expression of his eyes as he followed the graceful little figure in its retreat from the room, muttering below his breath: “Her ‘queenly sister,’ she called my dark-eyed Isabel. Ah, God! how easily I could bear the ruin that threatens me, and the disgrace that must inevitably follow, if my Isabel were provided for, my proud, imperious darling.” Mr. Hilton’s meditations were here interrupted by the entrance of his visitor, Mr. Chester St. John, a handsome, distinguished-looking man of thirty years, whose easy, graceful bearing and cultured manner proclaimed him at once a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. Mr. Hilton received him with every token of welcome, and St. John entered at once into the object of his visit. “I think you must have guessed long ago, Mr. Hilton,” he said, when cozily seated with that gentleman before a bright grate fire in the luxuriously furnished library, “that I love your beautiful daughter with all my heart. I have not spoken to her of this love, as yet, but I think--I have dared to hope, that she reciprocates my feeling, and I only await your permission to ask her to make me the happiest of men.” St. John paused here, waiting for Mr. Hilton’s answer. It was so long before the latter made any reply to Chester’s proposal that the young man began to fear he had received it unfavorably. “Is it possible that you have other views for your daughter, Mr. Hilton?” he asked, somewhat proudly, but with a tremor of real anxiety in his deep-toned voice. “No, no, my dear boy, you are the one man of all others to whom I could think for a moment of giving my precious child. I feel--nay! I know that you are worthy of her, and I will not stand between her and her love.” “Thanks, my dear sir, and I assure you you shall never have cause to regret the confidence you have placed in me. It shall be the labor of my life to make Iris happy----” “Iris!” At Chester St. John’s mention of this name Oscar Hilton sprang to his feet, with every trace of color dying out of his face, and his hands pressed tightly to his heart.