Pouncing upon the eldest gentleman of the party, she dragged him from his ambush, while the others also entered. The youngest approached the blushing, panting Edith with an almost boyish confidence of manner, as if assured of a welcome, while the remaining gentleman, who was verging toward middle age, quietly glided to the piano and gave his hand to Laura, who greeted him with a cordiality scarcely to be expected from so stately a young lady. The laws of affinity and selection were evidently in force here, and as the reader must surmise, long acquaintance had led to the present easy and intimate relations. "What do you mean," cried Zell, dragging under the gaslight her cavalier, who assumed much penitence and fear, "by thus rudely and abruptly breaking in upon the retirement of three secluded young ladies?" "At their devotions," added the cynical voice of the gentleman at the piano, who was no other than Mr. Goulden, Laura's admirer. Zell's attendant threw himself in the attitude of a suppliant and said deprecatingly: "Nay, but we are astronomers." "That's a fib, and not a very white one either," she retorted. "I don't believe you ever look toward heaven for anything." "What need of looking thither for heavenly bodies?" he replied in a low, meaning tone, regarding with undisguised admiration her glowing cheeks. "Moreover, I don't like telescopic distances," he continued, with a half-made motion to put his arm around her waist. "Come," she said, pirouetting out of his reach, "remember I am no longer a child, I am seventeen to-day." "Would that you might never be a day older in appearance and feelings!" "Are you willing to leave me so far behind?" she asked with some maliciousness. "No, but you would make me a boy again. If old Ponce de Leon had met a Miss Zell, he would soon have forsaken the swamps and alligators of Florida." "Oh, what a watery, scaly compliment! Preferred to swamps and alligators! Who would have believed it?" "I am not blind to your pretty, wilful blindness. You know I likened you to something too divine and precious to be found on earth." "Which is still true in the carrying out of your marvellously mixed metaphors. I must lend you my rhetoric book. But as your meaning dawns on me, I see that you are symbolized by old Ponce. I shall look in the history for the age of the ancient Spaniard to-morrow, and then I shall know how old you are, a thing I could never find out." As with little jets of silvery laughter and with butterfly motion she hovered round him, the very embodiment of life and beautiful youth, she would have made, to an artist's eye, a very true realization of the far-famed mythical fountain.