honest look of love and trust, such a look as Gilbert Lloyd recollected to have seen there when he first knew her years ago, but which had soon died out, and had never reappeared until that moment. And it was for Miles Challoner that her spirits had returned, her love and beauty had been renewed; for Miles Challoner, whom he hated with a deadly hate, who had been his rock ahead throughout his life, and who was now robbing him of what indeed he had once thrown aside as valueless, but what he would now give worlds to repossess. Gilbert Lloyd's face, all the features of which were so well trained and kept in such constant subjection, for once betrayed him, and the evil passion gnawing at his heart showed itself in his fiery eyes, surrounded by a strained hot flush, and in his rigidly set mouth. Tommy Toshington, tacking about the room to avoid the pressure of the crowd, and coming suddenly round Lloyd's stout neighbour, was horrified by the expression in Gilbert's face. "Why, what's the matter, Lloyd, my boy?" asked the old gentleman; "you look quite ghastly, by Jove! Ellis's claret not disagreed with you, has it?" "Not a bit of it, Tommy; I'm all right," said Gilbert with an effort; "room's a little hot--perhaps that's made me look a little white." "Look a little white! Dammy, you looked a little black when I first caught sight of you. You were scowling away at somebody; I couldn't make out who." "Not I," said Gilbert, with an attempt at a laugh; "I was only thinking of something." "O, shouldn't do that," said Mr. Toshington; "devilish stupid thing thinking; never comes to any good, and makes a fellow look deuced old Lots of people here to-night;" then looking round and sinking his voice, "and rather a mixture, eh? I can't think where some of the people come from; one never sees them anywhere else." And the old gentleman, whose father had been a dissenting hatter at Islington, propped his double gold-eyeglass on his nose, and surveyed the company with a look of excessive _hauteur_. "See!" he said presently, nudging Gilbert with his elbow; "you reck'lect what I told you, down at the Crystal Palace that day, about Etchingham and Miss What-do-you-call-'em, the singer?--that it wasn't any go for my lord, because there was another fellow cutting in in that quarter--you reck'lect? Well, look here, here they are,--What's-his-name, Chaldecott or something, and the girl." "I see them," said Lloyd, drawing back. "All right," said Toshington; "you needn't hide yourself; don't you be afraid, they're much too much taken up with each other to be looking at us. Gad, she's a devilish pretty girl, that, ain't she, Lloyd? There's a sort of a something about her which--such a deuced good style too, and way of carryin' herself! Gad, as to most of the women now--set of dumpy little brutes!--might be kitchen-maids, begad!" "Just look, Toshington, will you? I can't see, for this old fool's shoulder's in the way. Has Challoner left Miss Lambert?"