er of servants with refreshments; the crowds
gathered around fortune-tellers, whose predictions threw the parties
at each moment into shouts of merriment; the eager following of some
disappointed domino, interrogating every one to find out a lost mask.
For some time I stood an astonished spectator at the kind of secret
intelligence which seemed to pervade the whole assemblage, when suddenly a
mask, who for some time had been standing beside me, whispered in French,--

"If you pass your time in this manner, you must not feel surprised if your
place be occupied."

I turned hastily round, but she was gone. She, I say, for the voice was
clearly a woman's; her pink domino could be no guide, for hundreds of the
same color passed me every instant. The meaning of the allusion I had
little doubt of. I turned to speak to Power, but he was gone; and for the
first moment of my life, the bitterness of rivalry crossed my mind. It was
true I had resigned all pretensions in his favor. My last meeting with Lucy
had been merely to justify my own character against an impression that
weighed heavily on me; still, I thought he might have waited,--another day
and I should be far away, neither to witness nor grieve over his successes.

"You still hesitate," whispered some one near me.

I wheeled round suddenly, but could not detect the speaker, and was again
relapsing into my own musings, when the same voice repeated,--

"The white domino with the blue cape. Adieu."

Without waiting to reflect upon the singularity of the occurrence, I now
hurried along through the dense crowd, searching on every side for the
domino.

"Isn't that O'Malley?" said an Englishman to his friend.

"Yes," replied the other; "the very man we want. O'Malley, find a partner;
we have been searching a _vis-a-vis_ this ten minutes."

The speaker was an officer I had met at Sir George Dashwood's. "How did you
discover me?" said I, suddenly.

"Not a very difficult thing if you carry your mask in your hand that way,"
was the answer.

And I now perceived that in the distraction of my thoughts I had been
carrying my mask in this manner since my coming into the room.

"There now, what say you to the blue domino? I saw her foot, and a girl
with such an instep must be a waltzer."

I looked round, a confused effort at memory passing across my mind; my eyes
fell at the instant upon the embroidered sleeve of the domino, where a
rosebud worked in silver at once reminded