Mrs. Malcomson passed at that moment. "Should you call _her_ an old harridan?" Mr. St. John asked, smiling involuntarily. "No," the naval man was obliged to confess; "she's deuced handsome; but she presumes on her good looks, and doesn't trouble herself to be agreeable. I took her in to dinner the other night, and could hardly get a word out of her--not that she can't talk, mind you; she just wouldn't--to pique my interest, you know. You may take your oath that was it. There's no being up to women. But she'll find herself stranded, if she doesn't take care. _I_ shan't bother myself to pay her any more attention; and I'm a bad prophet if the other men in the place go out of their way to be civil to her much longer either. Besides," he said to Mr. Price, lowering his voice, but not enough to prevent Mr. St. John hearing--"her husband's jealous!" He turned up his eyes--"Game's not worth--you know!" Again Mr. Price looked at Mr. St. John. The band struck up; another waltz began; scarcely anything else had been danced. "Oh, this eternal one, two, three!" Mr. Price ejaculated; "how it wearies the mind! Society has sacrificed its most varied, wholesome, and graceful recreation--dancing--to this monotonous one, two, three!" He passed on, leaving Mr. St. John to his reflections. Captain Belliot bent before Mrs. Guthrie Brimston; "Our dance, I think," he said, offering her his arm. She took it, perking and preening herself, and began to say something about Mrs. Malcomson in agreement with his last remark: "You are quite right about her," Mr. St. John overheard. "She is always jeering at men. She abuses you wholesale. I've heard her often." Captain Belliot's face darkened; but he put his arm round his partner, and they glided off together slowly. When next they passed Mr. St. John, their faces wore a similar expression of drowsy sensuous delight, which gave them for the moment a curious likeness to each other. They looked incapable of speech or thought, or anything but the slow measure of their interwoven paces, and inarticulate emotion. The scene made a painful impression on Mr. St. John, and he began to feel as much out place as he looked. "We churchmen are a failure," he thought. "We have done no good, and are barely tolerated. Poetry of the pulpit--spiritual anodyne--what is it? Something I cannot grasp; but something wrong somewhere. Is Mrs. Malcomson right? Is Mr. Price? Where are they?" He looked about, but the dancers with parted lips and drowsy dreamy eyes, intoxicated with music and motion, floated past him in endless, regular succession, hemming him in, so that he could not move till the music stopped. CHAPTER V.