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cer to give a large ball in her great house in Germantown. All visiting Knickerbockers who might expect to be asked anywhere were asked to attend this ball, and Lilda's maid assured the hotel chambermaid that she never had known her young lady so hard to suit. And finally, after three different trials, to pick out that strange black mousseline-de-soie! She looked like pictures of foreigners, to tell you the truth, her young lady did! Of course, her grandmamma's pearls would make anything dressy, and there's no denying the black made her arms and neck look like ivory--but to snatch up that flame-coloured scarf her grandpapa had brought from India, and knot it over her shoulder at the last minute! It was downright outlandish. Mrs. Appleyard would never have liked it. She had a high, staglike carriage of the head, and as she was rather tall, she looked over most of her girl companions. Halfway through the dance she raised this dark head a little higher and stared. "Who is that man?" she asked abruptly. "Elliot Lestrange," the girls told her, "but he doesn't care for women. He's very proud." "I should like to meet him," she said simply. They tittered and teased her, but after all, she was a belle, and Mr. Lestrange was sent for. The young dancing man who undertook the message told freely how Lestrange had said, "Oh, hang it all, I'm not dancing to-night!" "But she's Miss Appleyard, of Boston and New York--she's a beauty!" "Then she must have plenty of beaux, Clarke, without me!" So young Mr. Clarke took his little revenge (for after all, he had used his dance with the dark beauty for this stupid errand and resented it), and in presenting the chilly hero, said maliciously, "Here is Mr. Lestrange, Miss Appleyard--but he says you must have plenty of beaux without him!" "That is just it," returned the calm Lilda, looking straight at the grey eyes that faced her under the thick honey-coloured hair (Lestrange, though of Huguenot descent, was curiously blonde). "I have _not_ enough beaux--without Mr. Lestrange! Will you have the next waltz, Mr. Lestrange--Mr. Clarke's, I believe it is?" "Thank you, yes, and this schottische, too, if I may," says Lestrange. The young people standing about said that they never took their eyes off each other from the moment she spoke to him, and that they swung into the dance like automatons, leaving her lawful squire, a young Philadelphian, irate and ridiculous.
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