At the mention of the former name, the tall and sharp-faced lady made him a gracious, if angular, acknowledgment; at the mention of the latter, the beautiful young creature in white looked up into his face and gave him a frank and lovely smile. She seemed even to half-extend her hand, and was beginning to speak, when Hertford, bewildered, stunned, and only dimly conscious of what he was doing, made a hurried bow, and with some excuse, moved rapidly away. With a numbed consciousness, and a bewilderment that scarcely allowed him to realize the objects before his eyes, he somehow got through the rooms and out into the street, and, finally, into his own room at the hotel. There he locked himself in, and, without turning up the light, threw himself upon his face on the bed. After ten minutes of such fierce unhappiness as he had never known before, he got up, turned on the light, and looked at his dishevelled figure in the glass. “Have I been crying?” he said to himself, seeing that his cheeks were flushed, his eyes red, and his face dampened either by tears, or by the sweat of pain. With his nature, romantic, sensitive, the blow was a terrible one. He sat down in a chair, thrust his fingers into his short locks, and rested his elbows on his knees. With the feeling in him that he could not give up this woman, even for this, he began to struggle with his disappointment. At first, it seemed intolerable that she had once belonged to another man--and he had to adjust his whole being to these changed conditions. He realized far more deeply than ever, how he had fixed his very soul upon her, and he resolved to go on and win her, if he could. He forced himself to realize the fact that she had loved another man, and had suffered for his sake the pangs of widowhood. It was some consolation to him to see that she had outlived them, and he was glad that youth and nature had asserted themselves and enabled her to regain her interest in life. No, he could not give her up, without her own refusal to be his wife. The fact that she had money, too, was intensely unpleasant to him. It was she--Mrs. Etheridge--who had given the hundred dollars to the poor man, and her arrogant-looking aunt, Miss Shelton, who had given the one dollar! The money was the girl’s, then--and she was the “Rich Lady,” after all! He could not get used to the idea. But he had fought out the fight and choked down his disappointment, by the time the ball broke up, and Tom Kennedy, puzzled by his friend’s strange conduct, came in search of him. When Hertford, in his disordered evening-dress, admitted him in answer to his knock, he was able to make up some excuse about having felt a sudden vertigo in the heated room, etc., and to carry it off with some likeness to truth.