y all three suspended their conversation to
watch the simple operation of putting salt upon the cloth. Cardington,
turning his eyes toward his hostess with an anticipatory relish for the
rest of her sentence, was suddenly struck by an inexplicable change.
Her face had become white in a moment, and she was regarding the maid's
trembling hands with curious intensity.

"You were saying, Miss Felicity,"--he reminded her.

"What was it?" she asked, recovering herself with an effort. "Oh, yes.
I was about to suggest that your height marks you out as the proper
person to hold up the hoops."

"Agreed!" he cried. "If you will stand by and hand them up."

This raillery was only a passing incident, for Miss Wycliffe's mood had
suffered a permanent eclipse. The bishop returned more reasonably and
with perfect seriousness to the subject of the election, and finally
launched upon a long diatribe after the Platonic fashion, with the
professor as a sympathetic interlocutor. His daughter refrained from
combatting him openly, but he divined and resented her unexpressed
opposition. Her attitude was one of finality; her silence indicated an
indifference to his opinions more exasperating than words. It was the
young astronomer, he reflected, who had helped to crystallise her
strange views. His lurking fear that she might one day marry and leave
him was aroused at the thought, and his heart contracted with jealousy.
She possessed in his eyes something of the sanctity of a vestal virgin,
one who must not be profaned by marriage. In such an event, also, his
cherished hope that she might complete the quadrangle of St. George's
Hall was likely to be frustrated forever. These fears moved him to
argue with a bitterness that served only to defeat his purpose the more.

Cardington's participation displayed an animus which hitherto had been
absent from his remarks upon the subject, as if the result of the
election had stirred him deeply, also.

"I have heard," he remarked, "that Emmet would never have been elected
if it had n't been for the support of Bat What's-his-name and the gang
that makes his saloon a rendezvous."

Whether this insinuation produced some effect upon the maid, or whether
the nervousness she had exhibited during the whole evening culminated
coincidently, none present could know, but no sooner had the words left
his lips than a finger-bowl which she held fell from her hands and
broke in a hundred glittering fragmen