“Well, I mustn’t plague you any more, Harry. I see your heart is too deeply involved. I hope Miss Baldwin is a nicer girl than I have ever thought her. Girls are sometimes prejudiced against each other.” “Occasionally,” said Harrington, with satirical emphasis. Lucy finished “Batti, batti,” with a final chord in the bass and a final twirl in the treble, and was pronounced by her grandmother to have achieved wonders. “Her time is a little uncertain,” her mother remarked modestly; “but she has a magnificent ear. You should see her run to the window when there is an organ in the street.” “Yes, mother,” cried Johnny, “but she never stays to listen unless there is a monkey on the top.” * * * * * December came, and the Hunt Ball, at which more than one of Miss Baldwin’s discarded or discarding admirers were present. The young lady looked very handsome in white satin and gauze, without a vestige of colour about her costume, and with her bodice cut with an audacity which is the peculiar privilege of dressmakers who live south of Oxford Street. The white gown set off Miss Baldwin’s brilliant colouring, and looked well against the pink coats of her partners. Harrington’s dress suit had been a thing of beauty and a joy to him when it came home from his London tailor’s, folded as no human hands could ever fold it again, enshrined in layers of tissue paper. His sisters had helped to unpack the tailor’s parcel, and had exclaimed at the extravagance of the corded-silk lapels and the satin sleeve-lining, and he had himself deemed that the archetypal coat could scarcely be more beautiful. Yet in this lurid ball-room he felt ashamed of his modest black twilled kersimere, and the insignificance of his white tie. The fox-hunters seemed to him to have it all their own way. Miss Baldwin, however, was not unkind. She danced with him oftener than with any one else, especially after supper, when she became unconscientious and forgetful as to her engagements, and when her card was found to hold twice as many names as there were dances, together with a pencil sketch of a lobster waltzing with a champagne bottle, supplied by an unknown hand. It was a cold, clear night, and youth and imprudence were going in couples to the garden behind the ball-room for coolness between the dances, and to look at the frosty stars, which in the enthusiasm of girlhood were accepted as a novelty. Harrington and Juliet were among those who ventured into the garden, the lady wrapped in a great white fur cloak, which made her look like a haystack in a snow-piece. “Poor Doriscourt brought me this polar bear-skin,” she said. “He shot the bear himself, at the risk of his life. I had asked him to bring me a skin when he came home.” “You asked him to give you something for which he must risk his life, and yet you make a great fuss at accepting Daudet’s last novel from me,” said Harrington, with tender reproachfulness.