When the dance had concluded, Sir Reginald led his partner through the series of long rooms, in the wake of a multitude of others; not a few drifted aside into various sequestered bowers of flirtation, but the mass of dancers kept on moving down the great corridor; their goal appeared to be the garden, and many couples were soon scattered over its grassy sward. Our hero and heroine found their way into the conservatory. It was a charming place; a dim religious light, distributed by Chinese lanterns, sufficed to show gigantic tropical plants, palms, pyramids of flowers, and various cunningly-placed crimson seats for _two_. Having found a vacancy in a retired nook, Sir Reginald threw himself into one corner of the sofa when Alice had seated herself at the other; a silence, broken only by the murmur of half-a-dozen adjacent flirtations and the splash of a fountain, lasted for at least five minutes. “What possessed me to come here?” thought Reginald to himself. “Absence of mind? I forgot for the moment it was not old times. This is just the sort of place we used to affect before we were married.” He looked at his wife--contemplated her with a grave critical scrutiny almost severe. She was leaning back in her corner, playing with her fan. The red background of the couch threw her slender graceful figure into bold relief. She was very lovely, certainly; and now he came to think of it, there _was_ a melancholy look on her face when in repose. “Reginald,” she said, sitting up and facing him, “do you remember the last time we danced together?” “No! I think not!” he answered dubiously. (I think you _do_, Sir Reginald.) “It was at the Lancasters; we danced together half the evening.” “Did we? Then we must have made ourselves rather remarkable,” he replied, with a short laugh, breaking off a large bit of fern and critically examining its fronds. “Do you remember the ball at Burford House?” Considering that it was at that very ball he had proposed to her, he could not well plead forgetfulness. “I do, of course,” he answered, glancing at her quickly, and pausing in the act of dissecting the fern bit by bit. “What is the good of calling up these reminiscences? There are some things which are best forgotten,” he added with cool judicial serenity. “Do you wish to forget _that_ evening, Reginald?” she asked in a tone of low reproach, and raising her fan to hide her trembling lips. “Well, no,” he replied slowly and with evident reluctance. “Not yet; but I quite agree with Balzac that ‘Life would be intolerable without a certain amount of forgetting;’ and I am glad to say that I have forgotten _much_.” “Why should you endeavour to forget? Why are you so changed to me, Reginald?” she asked with an enormous effort. “What makes you so stern, so hard to me?” she faltered, laying a timid little hand on his. “Won’t you tell me?”