Undine stood for a moment with bright cheeks and parted lips; then she flung her soft arms about the masseuse.  “Oh Mrs. Heeny—­you’re lovely to me!” she breathed, her lips on Mrs. Heeny’s rusty veil; while the latter, freeing herself with a good-natured laugh, said as she turned away:  “Go steady.  Undine, and you’ll get anywheres.”

Go steady, Undine!  Yes, that was the advice she needed.  Sometimes, in her dark moods, she blamed her parents for not having given it to her.  She was so young... and they had told her so little!  As she looked back she shuddered at some of her escapes.  Even since they had come to New York she had been on the verge of one or two perilous adventures, and there had been a moment during their first winter when she had actually engaged herself to the handsome Austrian riding-master who accompanied her in the Park.  He had carelessly shown her a card-case with a coronet, and had confided in her that he had been forced to resign from a crack cavalry regiment for fighting a duel about a Countess; and as a result of these confidences she had pledged herself to him, and bestowed on him her pink pearl ring in exchange for one of twisted silver, which he said the Countess had given him on her deathbed with the request that he should never take it off till he met a woman more beautiful than herself.

Soon afterward, luckily.  Undine had run across Mabel Lipscomb, whom she had known at a middle western boarding-school as Mabel Blitch.  Miss Blitch occupied a position of distinction as the only New York girl at the school, and for a time there had been sharp rivalry for her favour between Undine and Indiana Frusk, whose parents had somehow contrived—­for one term—­to obtain her admission to the same establishment.  In spite of Indiana’s unscrupulous methods, and of a certain violent way she had of capturing attention, the victory remained with Undine, whom Mabel pronounced more refined; and the discomfited Indiana, denouncing her schoolmates as a “bunch of mushes,” had disappeared forever from the scene of her defeat.

Since then Mabel had returned to New York and married a stock-broker; and Undine’s first steps in social enlightenment dated from the day when she had met Mrs. Harry Lipscomb, and been again taken under her wing.

Harry Lipscomb had insisted on investigating the riding-master’s record, and had found that his real name was Aaronson, and that he had left Cracow under a charge of swindling servant-girls out of their savings; in the light of which discoveries Undine noticed for the first time that his lips were too red and that his hair was pommaded.  That was one of the episodes that sickened her as she looked back, and made her resolve once more to trust less to her impulses—­especially in the matter of giving away rings.  In the interval, however, she felt she had learned a good deal, especially since, by Mabel Lipscomb’s advice, the Spraggs had moved to the Stentorian, where that lady was herself established.