"Look at that girl, now, with the purple feather! She skims along like a bird; she is as much at her ease as if she were in her arm-chair at home. By Jove! no, she ain't though!" For, as he speaks, "Thud!" comes the girl with the purple feather down in a sitting posture on the ice: men crowd round, inquire into casualties, pick her up again: off she goes! "You must be more careful next time in your selection of examples," Esther says, smiling mischievously; "_that_ one was not encouraging, you must allow." Constitutionally timid, she stands hesitating, in half-shyness, half-fear, and whole dread of being ridiculous; laughing, reddening, dimpling in the happy sunlight--as pretty a picture as ever little terrier-faced member of the Household has seen. "Perhaps you'd get on better if you tried walking between two people," he says, suggestively; "it is easier than with a chair. That is the way my sister began--I on one side, don't you know, and another fellow on the other. Here, Gerard, come and make yourself useful; give Miss Craven your arm!" Gerard looks--has been looking all the while; sees the face, that had met him so pale and dejected three hours ago, transformed by the keen January air, and the excitement of the moment, into more than its old loveliness; sees the soft splendour of languishing almond eyes, the guileless baby-smile. It is the transient happiness of a moment that has wrought the change, and he, in his rough anger, attributes it to the insatiate rabid desire for admiration. "She would flirt in her coffin," he says to himself, bitterly; and so answers, coldly, "I cannot--I have taken my skates off!" "All right," says Mr. Linley, gaily, and then, in an aside to Esther, "On duty, evidently!" "Evidently!" She assents with a faint smile, but her lips quiver with a dumb pain. "He need not have slighted me so openly," she thinks, in cruel mortification. "Perhaps if you gave me your hand I might manage to steady myself gradually," she says naïvely. Mr. Linley has no objection whatever to having his hand convulsively clutched by a very pretty woman, even though it is so clutched, not in affection to himself, but in the spasmodic effort to maintain the perpendicular--in the desperate endeavour to hinder her feet from outrunning body and head. And so she totters along--amused, flattered, frightened; and far too much absorbed in considerations of her own safety, to be at all aware of the condescending notice that several of the more worthy gender are good enough to bestow upon her, though the conceit inborn in the male mind would have made them completely sceptical of that fact, had they been told it.