Rose knelt down by her father’s vacant chair and laid her head on her arms. She tried to thrust the thought away, but it haunted her and that verse--she had been brought up on the Scriptures, she knew them by heart, their denunciations had frightened her when she was a little girl, they chilled her still--_For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all._ She shuddered; what should she do? O God, would it be very hard? She caught herself pleading; was she begging off? The stern conscience in her made her start up from her knees with a sob. XIII IT fell out--most unseasonably for the Vermilions--that Mrs. O’Neal had planned her annual reception for the same night as their fancy-ball. All the world was sure to go to Mrs. O’Neal’s sooner or later, and it broke up the mask-ball at an unusual hour, just before the champagne began to take effect, which was, on the whole, rather a mercy to the Vermilions, though they knew it not and suffered some keen pangs of anger and jealousy. Mrs. O’Neal had, of course, done it on purpose, Cynthia Vermilion said, and, perhaps she had! Mrs. O’Neal was a thoroughly worldly old person who would have driven her social chariot over a hundred Vermilions, figuratively speaking, and felt a grim pleasure in doing it. The world is not precisely the place for the cultivation of the more tender feelings, or an undue love for your neighbor, and Martha O’Neal had long since forgotten that there might be really serious reasons for considering any one but herself. So she gave her famous annual ball on that beautiful spring evening when the scent of the lilacs in her garden came in through the open windows. She had the house decorated with Easter lilies--it was Eastertide--and she had made her offering from the front pew in the most fashionable church in town, wearing her new bonnet while her head vibrated sufficiently to make the roses dance in weird mockery on its brim. She had remembered to mention, too, that she gave a thousand dollars a year to the church, because it is quite useless to hide your light under a bushel. Having done all these things she gave her ball on the Vermilions’ evening, and it was a very beautiful, a very select and a very famous affair, made more famous in the end by an incident which she had not foreseen.