"Oh! how do you do, Miss Harris? So glad to see you looking so well." This, very pointedly, as Louisa, perfectly gowned, smiling serenely, ascended the broad staircase. "I have not been ill, Lady Keogh." "Oh, no! of course not. And how is Mr. de Mountford?" "You can ask him yourself." And Louisa passed on to make way for Luke. And the same remarks and the same question were repeated _ad infinitum_, until a popular waltz played by the Hungarian gentlemen from Germany drew the fashionable crowd round the musicians' platform. Then Luke and Louisa contrived to make good their escape, and to reach the half-landing above the heads of numerous young couples that adorned the stairs. The hum of voices, the noise of shrill laughter, and swish of skirts and fans masked their own whisperings. The couples on the stairs were absorbed in their own little affairs; they were sitting out here so that they might pursue their own flirtations. Luke and Louisa could talk undisturbed. They spoke of the flat in Exhibition Road and of the furniture that Louisa had helped Edie to select. "There are only a few odds and ends to get now," Louisa was saying, "coal scuttles and waste-paper baskets; that sort of thing. I hope you don't think that we have been extravagant. Edie, I am afraid, had rather luxurious notions----" "Poor Edie!" "Oh! I don't think she minds very much. Life at Grosvenor Square in the past month has not been over cheerful." Then as Luke made no comment she continued in her own straightforward, matter-of-fact way--the commonplace woman facing the ordinary duties of life: "Now that the flat is all in order, you can all move in whenever you like--and then, Luke, you must begin to think of yourself." "Of you, Lou," he said simply. "Oh! there's nothing," she said, "to think about me." "There you are wrong, Lou, and you must not talk like that. Our engagement must be officially broken off. Colonel Harris has been too patient as it is." "Father," she rejoined, "does not wish the engagement broken off." "All these people," he said, nodding in the direction of the crowd below, "will expect some sort of announcement." "Let them." "Lou, you must take back your word." "How does one take back one's word, Luke? Have you ever done it? I shouldn't know how to." She looked at him straight, her eyes brilliant in the glare of the electric lamps, not a tear in them or in his, her face immovable, lest indifferent eyes happened to be turned up to where these two interesting people sat. Only a quiver round the lips, a sign that passion palpitated deep down within her heart, below the Bond Street gown and the diamond collar, the soul within the puppet. She held his glance, forcing him into mute acknowledgment that his philosophy, his worldliness, was only veneer, and that he had not really envisaged the hard possibility of actually losing her.