“Will you make my excuses to Bertha? and tell her that, having shown myself here, so that it might not be thought that I was out of temper at my bad luck, I shall be off.  Indeed, I do not feel quite up to entering into the thing.  You can understand, dear Lady Greendale, that at present things are going rather hardly with me.”

She gave him a sympathetic look.  “I can understand, Frank,” she said; “but here she comes.  You can make your excuses yourself.”

“I can quite understand that you don’t care about staying,” Bertha said, when he repeated what he had said to her mother.  “Well, I will give you the next dance, or, what will be nicer, I will sit it out with you.  Ah, here is my partner.

“I am afraid I have made a mistake, Mr. Jennings, and have got my card mixed up.  Do you mind taking the thirteenth dance instead of this?  I shall be very much obliged if you will.”

Her partner murmured his assent.

“Thank you,” Frank said, as she took his arm.  “Now, shall we go out on the balcony, or on the lawn?”

“The lawn, I think.  It is a lovely evening, and there is no fear of catching cold.

“I am afraid that you are very disappointed,” she went on, as they went out.  “I am disappointed, too.  I told you I wanted the best yacht to win, and it has not done so.”

“Thank you,” he replied, quietly.  “I should have liked to have won, just this once, but all along I felt that the chances were against me, and that fortune would play me some trick or other.”

“It was not fortune.  Fortune had nothing to do with it,” she said, indignantly.  “You were beaten by a crime—­by a mean, miserable crime—­by the same sort of crime by which you were beaten before.”

“I have no reason for supposing that there is any connection.”

“Frank,” she broke in, suddenly, and he started as for the first time for years she called him by his Christian name, “you are an old friend of ours, and you promised me that you would always be my friend.  Do you think that it is right to be trying to throw dust into my eyes?  Don’t you think, on the contrary, that as a friend you should speak frankly to me?”

Frank was silent for a moment.

“On some subjects, yes, Bertha; on others, what has passed between us makes it very difficult for a man to know what he ought to do.  But be assured that if I saw you make any fatal mistake, any mistake at least that I believed to be fatal, I should not hesitate, even if I knew that I should be misunderstood, and that I should forfeit your liking, by so doing.  This is just one of the cases when I do not feel justified, as yet, in speaking.  Carthew is not my friend, and you know it.  If I had had no personal feud—­for it has become that with him—­I should be more at liberty to speak, but as it is I would rather remain silent.  I tell you this now, that you may know, in case I ever do meddle in your affairs, how painful it is for me to do so, and how unwillingly I do it.  At any rate, there is nothing whatever to connect the accident that took place today with him.  The event is one of a series of successes that he has gained over me.  It does not affect me much, for though I should have liked to have won today, I don’t feel about such matters as I used to.