The Ball Room.

Rachel Lake, standing by the piano, turned over the leaves of the volume of ‘Moore’s Melodies’ from which the artist in black whiskers and white waistcoat had just entertained his noble patroness and his audience.

Everyone has experienced, I suppose for a few wonderful moments, now and then, a glow of seemingly causeless happiness, in which the earth and its people are glorified — peace and sunlight rest on everything — the spirit of music and love is in the air, and the heart itself sings for joy. In the light of this celestial illusion she stood now by the piano, turning over the pages of poor Tom Moore, as I have said, when a low pleasant voice near her said —

‘I was so glad to see that Dorcas had prevailed, and that you were here. We both agreed that you are too much a recluse in that Der Frieschutz Glen — at least, for your friends’ pleasure; and owe it to us all to appear now and then in this upper world.’

‘Excelsior, Miss Lake,’ interposed dapper little Mr. Buttle, with a smirk; ‘I think this little bit of music — it was got up, you know, by that old quiz, Dowager Lady Chelford — was really not so bad — a rather good idea, after all, Miss Lake. Don’t you?’

Poor Mr. Buttle did not know Lord Chelford, and thus shooting his ‘arrow o’er the house,’ he ‘hurt his brother.’ Chelford turned away, and bowed and smiled to one or two friends at the other side of the room.

‘Yes, the music was very pretty, and some of the songs were quite charmingly sung. I agree with you — we are very much obliged to Lady Chelford — that is her son, Lord Chelford.’

‘Oh!’ said Buttle, whose smirk vanished on the instant in a very red and dismal vacancy, ‘I— I’m afraid he’ll think me shockingly rude.’ And in a minute more Buttle was gone.

Miss Lake again looked down upon the page, and as she did so, Lord Chelford turned and said —

‘You are a worshipper of Tom Moore, Miss Lake?’

‘An admirer, perhaps — certainly no worshipper. Yet, I can’t say. Perhaps I do worship; but if so, it is a worship strangely mixed with contempt.’ And she laughed a little. ‘A kind of adoring which I fancy belongs properly to the lords of creation, and which we of the weaker sex have no right to practise.’

‘Miss Lake is pleased to be ironical to-night,’ he said, with a smile.

‘Am I? I dare say. All women are. Irony is the weapon of cowardice, and cowardice the vice of weakness. Yet I think I was naturally bold and true. I hate cowardice and deception even in myself — I hate perfidy — I hate fraud.’

She tapped a little emphasis upon the floor with her white satin shoe, and her eyes flashed with a dark and angry meaning among the crowd at the other end of the room, as if for a second or two following an object to whom in some way the statement applied.

The strange bitterness of her tone, though it was low enough, and something wild, suffering, and revengeful in her look, though but momentary, and hardly definable, did not escape Lord Chelford, and he followed unconsciously the direction of her glance; but there was nothing there to guide him to a conclusion, and the good people who formed that polite and animated mob were in his eyes, one and all, quite below the level of tragedy, or even of melodrama.

‘And yet, Miss Lake, we are all more or less cowards or deceivers — at least, to the extent of suppression. Who would speak the whole truth, or like to hear it? — not I, I know.’

‘Nor I,’ she said, quietly.

‘And I do think, if people had no reserves, they would be very uninteresting,’ he added.

She was looking, with a strange light upon her face — a smile, perhaps — upon the open pages of ‘Moore’s Melodies’ as he spoke.

‘I like a little puzzle and mystery — they surround our future and our past; and the present would be insipid, I think, without them. Now, I can’t tell, Miss Lake, as you look on Tom Moore there, and I try to read your smile, whether you happen at this particular moment to adore or despise him.’

‘Moore’s is a daring morality — what do you think, for instance, of these lines?’ she said, touching the verse with her bouquet.

Lord Chelford read —

I ask not, I know not, if guilt’s in thy heart

I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.’

He laughed.

‘Very passionate, but hardly respectable. I once knew,’ he continued a little more gravely, ‘a marriage made upon that principle, and not very audaciously either, which turned out very unhappily.’

‘So I should conjecture,’ she said, rising from her chair, rather drearily and abstractedly, ‘and there is good old Lady Sarah. I must go and ask her how she does.’ She paused for a moment, holding her bouquet drooping towards the floor, and looking with her clouded eyes down — down — through it; and then she looked up suddenly, with an odd, fierce smile, and she said bitterly enough —‘and yet, if I were a man, and capable of loving, I could love no other way; because I suppose love to be a madness, and the sublimest and the most despicable of states. And I admire Moore for that flash of the fallen angelic — it is the sentiment of a hero and a madman — too base and too noble for this cool, wise world.’

She was already moving away, nebulous in hovering folds of snowy muslin. And she floated down like a cloud upon the ottoman, beside old Lady Sarah, and smiled and leaned towards her, and talked in her sweet, low, distinct accents. And Lord Chelford followed her, with a sad sort of smile, admiring her greatly.

Of course, non cuivis contigit, it was not every man’s privilege to dance with the splendid Lady of Brandon. It was only the demigods who ventured within the circle. Her kinsman, Lord Chelford, did so; and now handsome Sir Harry Bracton, six feet high, so broad-shouldered and slim-waisted, his fine but not very wise face irradiated with indefatigable smiles, stood and conversed with her, with that jaunty swagger of his — his weight now on this side, now on that, squaring his elbows like a crack whip with four-in-hand, and wagging his perfumed tresses — boisterous, rollicking, beaming with immeasurable self-complacency.

Stanley Lake left old Lady Chelford’s side, and glided to that of Dorcas Brandon.

‘Will you dance this set — are you engaged, Miss Brandon?’ he said, in low eager tones.

‘Yes, to both questions,’ answered she, with the faintest gleam of the conventional smile, and looking now gravely again at her bouquet.

‘Well, the next possibly, I hope?’

‘I never do that,’ said the apathetic beauty, serenely.

Stanley looked as if he did not quite understand, and there was a little silence.

‘I mean, I never engage myself beyond one dance. I hope you do not think it rude — but I never do.’

‘Miss Bra............