“I wonder Charles is not jealous,” observed Mrs. Percy Hamilton, playfully, after admiring to Lord Delmont his wife’s peculiar grace in waltzing.  “Allan seems to have claimed her attention entirely.”

“Charles has something better to do,” replied his father, laughing, as the little Lord Manvers flew by him, with his arm twined round his cousin Gertrude in the inspiring galop, and seemed to have neither ear nor eye for any one or anything else.  “Caroline, do you permit your daughter to play the coquette so early?”

“Better at seven than seventeen, Edward, believe me; had she numbered the latter, I might be rather more uneasy, at present I can admire that pretty little pair without any such feeling.  Gertrude told me to-day, she did not like to see her cousin Charles so shy, and she should do all she could to make him as much at home as she and her brother are.”

“She has succeeded, then, admirably,” replied Edward, laughing, “for the little rogue has not much shyness in him now.  Herbert and Mary have got that corner all to themselves; I should like to go slily behind them, and find out what they are talking about.”

“Try and remember what you used to talk about to your partners in this very room, some twenty years back, and perhaps recollection will satisfy your curiosity,” said Lady St. Eval, smiling, but faintly, however; the names Herbert and Mary had recalled a time when those names had often been joined before, and the silent prayer arose that their fates might not resemble those whose names they bore, that they might be spared a longer time to bless those who loved them.

“Twenty years back, Caroline, what an undertaking.  Allan is more like the madcap I was then, so I can better enter into his feelings of pleasure.  By-the-bye, why are not Mrs. Cameron’s family here to-night?  I half expected to meet them here yesterday.”

“They spend this season with Sir Walter and Lady Cameron in Scotland,” replied Lady St. Eval.  “Florence declared she would take no excuse; the Marquis and Marchioness of Malvern, with Emily and Louis, are there also, and Lady Alford is to join them in a week or two.”

“You were there last summer, were you not?”

“We were.  They are one of the happiest couples I know, and their estate is most beautiful.  Florence declares that, were Sir Walter Scott still living, she intended to have made him take her for a heroine, her husband for a hero, and transport them some centuries back, to figure on that same romantic estate in some very exciting scenes.”

“Had he killed Cameron’s first love and rendered him desperate, and made Florence some consoling spirit, to remove his despair, instead of making him so unromantically enabled to conquer his passion, because unreturned.  Why I could make as good a story as Sir Walter himself; if she will reward me liberally, I will set about it.”

“It will never do, Lord Delmont, it is much too common-place,” said Mrs. Percy Hamilton, smiling.  “It is a very improper question, I allow, but who was Sir Walter’s first love?”