"I know I am asking you a great deal,"--rather nervously,--"but won't you think of it, Molly?" "I am afraid I won't, just yet," replies that lady, suavely. "Be sensible, Teddy; remember all we said to John, and think how foolish we should look going back of it all. Why should things not go on safely and secretly, as at present, and let us put marriage out of our heads until something turns up? I am like Mr. Micawber; I have an almost religious belief in the power things have of turning up." "_I_ haven't," says Luttrell, with terse melancholy. "So much the worse for you. And besides, Teddy, instinct tells me you are much nicer as a lover than you will be as a husband. Once you attain to that position, I doubt I shall be able to order you about as I do at present." "Try me." "Not for a while. There, don't look so dismal, Ted; are we not perfectly happy as we are?" "You may be, perhaps." "Don't say, 'perhaps;' you may be certain of it," says she, gayly. "I haven't a doubt on the subject. Come, do look cheerful again. Men as fair as you should cultivate a perpetual smile." "I wish I was a nigger," says Luttrell, impatiently. "You have such an admiration for blackamoors, that then, perhaps, you might learn to care for me a degree more than you do just now. Shadwell is dark enough for you." "Yes; isn't he handsome?" With much innocent enthusiasm. "I thought last night at dinner, when----" "I don't in the least want to know what you thought last night of Shadwell's personal appearance," Luttrell interrupts her, angrily. "And I don't in the least want you to hold my hand a moment longer," replies Miss Massereene, with saucy retaliation, drawing her fingers from his with a sudden movement, and running away from him up the stone steps of the balcony into the house. * * * * * All through the night, both when waking and in dreams, the remembrance of the slight cast upon her absent mother by Mr. Amherst, and her own silent acceptance of it, has disturbed the mind of Marcia. "A dancer!" The word enrages her. Molly's little passionate movement and outspoken determination to hear no ill spoken of her dead father showed Marcia even more forcibly her own cowardice and mean policy of action. And be sure she likes Molly none the more in that she was the one to show it. Yet Molly cannot possibly entertain the same affection for a mere memory that she feels for the mother on whom she has expended all the really pure and true love of which she is capable. It is not, therefore, toward her grandfather, whose evil tongue has ever been his own undoing, she cherishes the greatest bitterness, but toward herself, together with a certain scorn that, through moneyed motives, she has tutored herself to sit by and hear the one she loves lightly mentioned.