Abel bows smilingly.

“You must have known her.”

“Yes, a little.”

“Well, didn’t you know what a stunning heiress she was, and so handsome!  How’d you, of all men in the world, let her slip through your fingers?”

A curious silence follows this effusion.  Corlaer Van Boozenberg is slightly flown with wine.  Hal Battlebury, who sits near him, looks troubled.  Herbert Octoyne and Mellish Whitloe exchange meaning glances.  The young ladies—­Mrs. Plumer is the only matron, except Mrs. Dagon, who sits below—­smile pleasantly.  Sligo Moultrie eats grapes.  Grace Plumer waits to hear what Abel says, or to observe what he does.  Mrs. Dagon regards the whole affair with an approving smile, nodding almost imperceptibly a kind of Freemason’s sign to Mrs. Plumer, who thinks that the worthy young Van Boozenberg has probably taken too much wine.

Abel Newt quietly turns to Grace Plumer, saying,

“Poor Corlaer!  There are disadvantages in being the son of a very rich man; one is so strongly inclined to measure every thing by money..  As if money were all!”

He looks her straight in the eyes as he says it.  Perhaps it is some effort he is making which throws into his look that cold, hard blackness which is not beautiful.  Perhaps it is some kind of exasperation arising from what he has heard Moultrie say privately and Van Boozenberg publicly, as it were, that pushes him further than he means to go.  There is a dangerous look of craft; an air of sarcastic cunning in his eyes and on his face.  He turns the current of talk with his neighbors, without any other indication of disturbance than the unpleasant look.  Van Boozenberg is silent again.  The gentle, rippling murmur of talk fills the room, and at a moment when Moultrie is speaking with his neighbor, Abel says, looking at the engraving of the Madonna,

“Miss Grace, I feel like those cherubs.”

“Why so, Mr. Newt?”

“Because I am perfectly happy.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, Miss Grace, and for the same reason that I entirely love and admire.”

Her heart beats violently.  Sligo Moultrie turns and sees her face.  He divines every thing in a moment, for he loves Grace Plumer.

“Yes, Miss Grace,” he says, in a quick, thick tone, as if he were continuing a narration—­“yes, she became Princess of Este; but the fiery eyes burned her, and the sweet tongue stung her forever and ever.”

Mrs. Plumer and Mrs. Dagon are rising.  There is a rustling tumult of women’s dresses, a shaking out of handkerchiefs, light gusts of laughter, and fragments of conversation.  The handsome women move about like birds, with a plumy, elastic motion, waving their fans, smelling their bouquets, and listening through them to tones that are very low.  The Prince of the house is every where, smiling, sinuous, dark in the eyes and hair.