“Why have you not ask me to dance?” she said. “Poor Pamela is flouted of all of whom she had the hope to be honoured. You do not desire my hand; no, nor Mr Sherree-den eiser. ‘I am not to lead you out, _ma chèrie_,’ he say. ‘It is because I am ask to drop the sobstance for the shadow.’ I request of him what he mean. ‘’Tis only the fable of the dog and the piece of meat,’ says he. ‘And how do that concern itself of the question?’ I ask. ‘Why,’ he answer, ‘I am the dog and you are the piece of meat; and that is to say that Pamela is food for reflection’--and then he laugh, and bid me ask of Monsieur Murk to interpret me the fable.” Her voice was full of tenderness and appeal. Ned, despite some emotion consequent on the mention of his rival, felt as remorseful as if he had wantonly crushed a rose in which lay a sleeping Cupid. He knew he had not asked the girl to dance with him, for only the reason that a morbid sensitiveness impelled him to self-martyrdom--drove his pride and his jealousy to battle; the one ready to resent that an obvious preference was not shown by her for him out of all the world, ready always to fold a wing of pretended indifference over the bleeding wound in his breast; the other ready, on the least provocation, to make a shameless confession of the corroding secrets of its inmost soul. Certainly Providence may be assumed to have its own reason for constituting a disease to be its highest ethical expression. Truth and Love! How have these inoculated one another with the virus drawn from ages of misfaith, till each seems to have become an inextricable constituent of the common plague of jealousy! “And am I also the piece of meat to you,” says Mistress Pam, “that you will have nussing to speak with me?” “I will not drop you for the shadow, at least,” cries the other fervently--“no, not as long as I have a tooth in my head!” So love glorifies bathos. The two stood up together for the next set. Thenceforth Ned moved on air, breathed all the evening the intoxicating oxygen of idolatry. The girl alternately flattered and flouted, wounded and caressed him. He must draw what consolation he could from the fact that Mr Sheridan at least left him a fair field. Now and then he would chance upon view of this gentleman, and always it seemed to him that, as the evening progressed, the convivial face waxed steadily more rubicund, the fine eyes more unspeculative. Once the party came together over the refreshment trays--the sweetmeats and negus that preceded the final break-up. “Do not eat so much cake, child,” says madame la gouvernante to Pamela. “It will lie heavy on your chest.” “Happy cake!” murmurs Sheridan, so that the ladies might not hear him. But my lord did; and he might have been moved to some resentment had it not been for the other’s obvious condition.