In the doorway he meets Marcia; she, too, has been a witness of the garden scene, and as he passes her she glances up at him with a curious smile. "If you wish to keep her you should look after her," she whispers, with white lips. "If she needs looking after, I do _not_ wish for her," he answers, bitterly, and the next moment could kill himself, in that he has been so far wanting in loyalty to his most disloyal love. With his mind quite made up, he waits through two dances silently, almost motionless, with his back against a friendly wall, hardly taking note of anything that is going on around him, until such time as he can claim another dance from Molly. It comes at last: and, making his way through the throng of dancers, he reaches the spot where, breathless, smiling, she sits fanning herself, an adoring partner dropping little honeyed phrases into her willing ear. "This is our dance," Luttrell says, in a hard tone, standing before her, with compressed lips and a pale face. "Is it?" with a glance at her card. "Never mind your card. I know it is ours," he says, and, offering her his arm, leads her, not to the ball-room, but on to a balcony, from which the garden can be reached by means of steps. Before descending he says,--always in the same uncompromising tone: "Are you cold? Shall I fetch you a shawl?" And she answers: "No, thank you. I think the night warm," being, for the moment, carried away by the strangeness and determination of his manner. When they are in the garden, and still he has not spoken, she breaks the silence. "What is it, Teddy?" she asks, lightly. "I am all curiosity. I never before saw you look so angry." "'Angry'?--no,--I hardly think there is room for anger. I have brought you here to tell you--I will not keep to my engagement with you--an hour longer." Silence follows this declaration,--a dead silence, broken only by the voices of the night and the faint, sweet, dreamy sound of one of Gungl's waltzes as it steals through the air to where they stand. They have ceased to move, and are facing each other in the narrow pathway. A few beams from the illumined house fall across their feet; one, more adventurous than the rest, has lit on Molly's face, and lingers there, regardless of the envious moonbeams. How changed it is! All the soft sweetness, the gladness of it, that characterized it a moment since, is gone. All the girlish happiness and excitement of a first ball have vanished. She is cold, rigid, as one turned to stone. Indignation lies within her lovely eyes. "I admit you have taken me by surprise," she says, slowly. "It is customary--is it not?--for the one who breaks an engagement to assign some reason for so doing?" "It is. You shall have my reason. Half an hour ago I stood at that window,"--pointing to it,--"and saw you in the shrubberies--with--Shadwell!" "Yes? And then?"