ing of
admiration. She had never heard him say a word, and it was with a
sensation of the liveliest interest that she listened to his brief passage
with her partner. At his final retort her tender heart was overcome with
pity. He was poor, then, or at least he was allowed the use of no money.
And all of him that was outside his pockets seemed so sane and so
gentlemanly; it seemed a pity to let him lack a little sympathy.

The Lady Alicia might be described as a becoming frock stuffed with
sentiment. Through a pair of large blue eyes she drank in romance, and
with the reddest and most undecided of lips she felt a vague desire to
kiss something. At the end of the dance she managed by a series of little
manoeuvres to find herself standing close to his elbow. She sighed twice,
but he still seemed absorbed in his thoughts. Then with a heroic effort
she summed up her courage, and said in a low and rather shaky voice,
"You--you--you are unha--appy."

Mr Beveridge turned and looked down on her with great interest. Her eyes
met his for a moment and straightway sought the floor. Thus she saw
nothing of a smile that came and went like the shadow of a puff of smoke.
He took his hands out of his pockets, folded his arms, and, with an air of
the deepest dejection, sighed heavily. She took courage and looked up
again, and then, as he only gazed into space in the most romantically
melancholy fashion and made no answer, she asked again very timidly,
"Wh--what is the matter?"

Without saying a word Mr Beveridge bent courteously and offered her his
right arm. She took it with the most delicious trepidation, glancing round
hurriedly to see whether the Countess noticed her. Another dance was just
beginning, and in the general movement her mysterious acquaintance led her
without observation to a seat in the window of a corridor. There he
pressed her hand gently, stroked his long moustaches for a minute, and
then said, with an air of reflection: "There are three ways of making a
woman like one. I am slightly out of practice. Would you be kind enough to
suggest a method of procedure?"

Such a beginning was so wholly unexpected that Lady Alicia could only give
a little gasp of consternation. Her companion, after pausing an instant
for a reply, went on in the same tone, "I am aware that I have begun well.
I attracted your attention, I elicited your sympathy, and I pressed your
hand; but for the life of me I can't remember what I generally do