“I believe there must be something unusually exhilarating in the atmosphere,” Mona replied, a gleeful little laugh rippling over her smiling lips, although she blushed beneath the woman’s searching look.  “Don’t you think that excitement is sometimes infectious?—­and surely everybody has been active and gay for days.  I like to see people happy, and then the morning is perfectly lovely.”

Truly the world was all couleur de rose to her since love’s elixir had given a new impetus to her heart-pulses!

Mrs. Montague frowned slightly, for somehow the girl’s unusual mood annoyed her.

She could not forget her exceeding loveliness on Saturday evening, when she had been arrayed in the festal robe which she herself was to wear at the ball, and the memory of it nettled her.

Perhaps, she thought, Ruth remembered it also, and was secretly exulting over the fact of her own beauty.  Exceedingly vain herself, she was quick to suspect vanity in others, and this thought only increased her irritation.

“I’d give a great deal if she wasn’t so pretty; and—­and that style of beauty always annoys me,” she said to herself, with a feeling of angry impatience.

And giving a sudden twitch to a delicate ruffle, which she had begun to arrange upon the corsage of a dress, to show Mona how she wanted it, she made a great rugged tear in the filmy fabric, thus completely ruining the frill.

This only served to increase her ill humor.

“There! now I cannot wear this dress at dinner to-day,” she cried, flushing angrily over the mishap, “for the frill is ruined.”

“Haven’t you something else that you can use in its place?” Mona quietly asked.

“No; nothing looks as well on this corsage as these wide, fleecy frills of crape lisse.  It is the only dress, too, that I have not already worn here, and I was depending upon it for to-day,” was the irritable response.

Mona thought she had plenty of laces and ruffles that would have answered very well, and which might easily have been substituted, but she did not think it best to make any further suggestions to her in her present mood.

“I know what I can do,” Mrs. Montague continued, after a moment, in a milder tone.  “I saw some ruffling very nearly like this in a milliner’s window at Rhinebeck, when I was out riding on Saturday.  There are some other little things that I shall want for this evening, and you may take a walk by and by to get them for me.”

Rhinebeck was a full mile away, and Mrs. Montague could easily have arranged to have Mona ride, for a carriage was sent every morning for the mail; but it did not occur to her to do so, or if it did, she evidently did not care to put herself to that trouble.

Mona, however, did not mind the walk—­indeed, on the whole, she was rather glad of the privilege of getting out by herself into the sunshine which was so in harmony with her own bright mood.  Still she could not help feeling that it was rather inconsiderate of Mrs. Montague to require her to walk two miles simply to gratify a mere whim.