She could never enter a crowded room, without becoming at once a centre for all glances. Molly, close behind, was neglected by comparison, and was quite content to have it so. While amused with the scene, she did not expect admiration. The one thing on which her heart was set was the promised sight of Mr. Walter Scott, the future “Wizard of the North.” His real work in life, the writing of the “Waverley Novels,” had not then been so much as begun; but he was already well known as the very successful author of divers historical ballads, which had taken the fashionable world by storm. When he came from his Scotch home to London, he was fêted and made much of to any extent. Molly pictured him to herself as a quite ineffable individual, with fathomless dark eyes and flowing locks of ebony, such as should befit an immortal poet. And “immortal” Scott doubtless is, in the literary sense, with still no peer, but hardly as a poet. Popular judgment made a mistake there—not for the first or the last time in its existence. “Where, where, is he of the radiant brow, The faulchion glance and the flashing eye, Whose lofty mien and dazzling air Bespeaks——” etc. This is not a quotation; it is merely a specimen of the kind of thing that our great-grandmothers and grandmothers in their early youth admired and doted on. The bump of veneration must have been more highly developed on people’s heads in those days than in these. And how they did admire and did dote, the dear young things! Just as Molly Baron did that evening. She sat upon her quiet seat, neglected, yet perfectly happy at the thought of the glorious poet-form, which her gaze was soon to rest upon. She did not care to talk. She did not wish to dance. She was wrapped in a dream, from which Mrs. Bryce’s decisive finger-tips aroused her. “Wake up, my dear. Are you asleep, Molly? Here he comes.” Molly looked rapturously around and about in eager quest. But she saw no wondrous human form to correspond to the image in her mind. A lame man, of good height, rather robust in make, healthy, but scarcely “elegant,” with brown hair, flaxen eyebrows, a long upper lip, and a frank genial expression—no, that was not Molly Baron’s ideal of an immortal poet. His eyes were only light grey in colour, not dark and wild, as a poet’s should have been. Yet the gleams of arch brightness which lighted up his face, as he talked, went a long way towards redeeming it from homeliness. Then Molly was called up to be presented to the poet; and he said a few kind words to the young girl—she could not afterwards remember what they were. In later years she would be glad to know always that she had seen and spoken with him; but at the moment her mind was full of its sudden disillusionment.