"And yet you can come here to this ball?" said Mrs. D'Arcy. "Exactly so. I will go where I please till they boycott the very roads from under my feet. I expect to hear soon that they have boycotted Ada and me, so that no young man shall come and marry us. Of course, I don't understand such things, but it seems to me that the Government should interfere to defend us." When the evening came, and the witching hour was there, Ada and Edith appeared at the barracks as bright as their second-hand finery could make them. They had awarded to them something of especial glory as being boycotted heroines, and were regarded with a certain amount of envy by the Miss Blakes, Miss Bodkins, Miss Lamberts, Miss Ffrenchs, and Miss Parsons of the neighbourhood. They had, none of them, as yet achieved the full honours of boycotting, though some of them were half-way to it. The Miss Ffrenchs told them how their father's sheep had been boycotted, the shepherd having been made to leave his place. The Miss Blakes had been boycotted because their brother had been refused a car. And the Bodkins of Ballytowngal were held to have been boycotted _en masse_ because of the doings at Moytubber gorse. But none of them had been boycotted as had been the Miss Jones'; and therefore the Miss Jones' were the heroines of the evening. "I declare it is very nice," Ada said to her sister that night, when they got home to Mrs. D'Arcy's, "because it got for us the pick of all the partners." "It got for you one partner, at any rate," said Edith, "either the boycotting or something else." Edith had determined that it should be so; or had determined at any rate that it should seem to be so. In her resolution that the hero of the day should fall in love with her sister, she had almost taught herself to think that the process had already taken place. It was so natural that the bravest man should fall in love with the fairest lady, that Edith took it for granted that it already was so. She too in some sort was in love with her own sister. Ada to her was so fair, so soft, so innocent, so feminine and so lovable, that her very heart was in the project,--and the project that Ada should have the hero of the hour to herself. And yet she too had a heart of her own, and had told herself in so many words, that she herself would have loved the man,--had it been fitting that she should burden him with such a love. She had rejected the idea as unfitting, impossible, and almost unfeminine. There was nothing in her to attract the man. The idea had sprung up but for a moment, and had been cast out as being monstrous. There was Ada, the very queen of beauty. And the gallant hero was languishing in her smiles. It was thus that her imagination carried her on, after the notion had once been entertained. At the ball Edith did in fact dance with Captain Clayton quite as often as did Ada herself, but she danced with him, she said, as the darling sister of his supposed bride. All her talk