With this heavy bribe, he was summarily detached from his post by the piano, and carried off by the triumphant Miss Selina (swearing to himself, despite a smiling countenance). Madeline played and played, until she felt that her fingers had no feeling, and were just as stiff and mechanical as the teeth in a musical-box. At length supper released her. She stood up, half expectant, as the others flocked past two and two, each happy girl provided with a cavalier--beaming, giggling, blushing, as the case might be! Whilst she waited, a bony, much-beringed hand was laid heavily upon her shoulder, and she beheld Miss Selina, who had arrested Mr. Wynne. “Madeline, my dear,” she whispered, “I am sorry there is no room for you. I’ll send you out a sandwich, or something.” And then she passed on, leaving poor Madeline alone in that big empty room, with a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes. Miss West was occasionally foolish enough to cut off her nose to spite her face, and she indignantly declined the subsequent sandwich brought in on a plate by the sympathetic parlourmaid, who vowed “it was a shame,” but met with no encouragement to relieve her mind further on the subject. Madeline knew that she dared not go to bed. She had still to play--“it was in the bond.” So she had not even that small comfort; nor might she, as yet, indulge herself in the further luxury of a thoroughly good cry. “What a difference money makes!” she said to herself bitterly. “What a contrast between this night and last year! Who would have believed--I, least of all--that that night twelve months I should be sitting here alone? However, I don’t suppose,” she added, half aloud, with a catch in her voice, “that any one misses me.” In this supposition she was wrong. Many people missed the girl in black, who had sung _the_ song of the concert, who had played unremittingly all the evening, and who had such a shabby dress, and such a sweetly pretty face! Not a few of Mrs. Harper’s guests, who were eating her good things and sipping her champagne, were registering a black mark against her all the same, and thinking that they would be sorry if any friend of _theirs_ had to fill the post of her present “pupil-teacher.” Mr. Wynne dissembled--as they used to say in good old melodramas--and was most agreeable to his partner, Miss Selina, but inwardly he was raging. With professional cleverness he drew her out, and cross-examined her with regard to Miss West, and she--her tongue unloosened by two glasses of champagne, her vanity stimulated by his attentions (to her plate)--was completely off her guard, and as easily turned inside-out as any quaking witness at the Old Bailey.