Mr. Bernard came in later than any of them; he had been busy with his new duties.  He looked well and that is saying a good deal; for nothing but a gentleman is endurable in full dress.  Hair that masses well, a head set on with an air, a neckerchief tied cleverly by an easy, practised hand, close-fitting gloves, feet well shaped and well covered,—­these advantages can make us forgive the odious sable broadcloth suit, which appears to have been adopted by society on the same principle that condemned all the Venetian gondolas to perpetual and uniform blackness.  Mr. Bernard, introduced by Mr. Geordie, made his bow to the Colonel and his lady and to Miss Matilda, from whom he got a particularly gracious curtsy, and then began looking about him for acquaintances.  He found two or three faces he knew,—­many more strangers.  There was Silas Peckham,—­there was no mistaking him; there was the inelastic amplitude of Mrs. Peckham; few of the Apollinean girls, of course, they not being recognized members of society,—­but there is one with the flame in her cheeks and the fire in her eyes, the girl of vigorous tints and emphatic outlines, whom we saw entering the schoolroom the other day.  Old Judge Thornton has his eyes on her, and the Colonel steals a look every now and then at the red brooch which lifts itself so superbly into the light, as if he thought it a wonderfully becoming ornament.  Mr. Bernard himself was not displeased with the general effect of the rich-blooded schoolgirl, as she stood under the bright lamps, fanning herself in the warm, languid air, fixed in a kind of passionate surprise at the new life which seemed to be flowering out in her consciousness.  Perhaps he looked at her somewhat steadily, as some others had done; at any rate, she seemed to feel that she was looked at, as people often do, and, turning her eyes suddenly on him, caught his own on her face, gave him a half-bashful smile, and threw in a blush involuntarily which made it more charming.

“What can I do better,” he said to himself, “than have a dance with Rosa Milburn?” So he carried his handsome pupil into the next room and took his place with her in a cotillon.  Whether the breath of the Goddess of Love could intoxicate like the cup of Circe,—­whether a woman is ever phosphorescent with the luminous vapor of life that she exhales,—­these and other questions which relate to occult influences exercised by certain women we will not now discuss.  It is enough that Mr. Bernard was sensible of a strange fascination, not wholly new to him, nor unprecedented in the history of human experience, but always a revelation when it comes over us for the first or the hundredth time, so pale is the most recent memory by the side of the passing moment with the flush of any new-born passion on its cheek.  Remember that Nature makes every man love all women, and trusts the trivial matter of special choice to the commonest accident.