r less particular--"

"Ah," the two elder ladies sighed.

"Still, to have kept her grandmother's carriage at a defaulter's door!"
Mr. van der Luyden protested; and Archer guessed that he was
remembering, and resenting, the hampers of carnations he had sent to
the little house in Twenty-third Street.

"Of course I've always said that she looks at things quite
differently," Mrs. Archer summed up.

A flush rose to May's forehead. She looked across the table at her
husband, and said precipitately: "I'm sure Ellen meant it kindly."

"Imprudent people are often kind," said Mrs. Archer, as if the fact
were scarcely an extenuation; and Mrs. van der Luyden murmured: "If
only she had consulted some one--"

"Ah, that she never did!" Mrs. Archer rejoined.

At this point Mr. van der Luyden glanced at his wife, who bent her head
slightly in the direction of Mrs. Archer; and the glimmering trains of
the three ladies swept out of the door while the gentlemen settled down
to their cigars. Mr. van der Luyden supplied short ones on Opera
nights; but they were so good that they made his guests deplore his
inexorable punctuality.

Archer, after the first act, had detached himself from the party and
made his way to the back of the club box. From there he watched, over
various Chivers, Mingott and Rushworth shoulders, the same scene that
he had looked at, two years previously, on the night of his first
meeting with Ellen Olenska. He had half-expected her to appear again
in old Mrs. Mingott's box, but it remained empty; and he sat
motionless, his eyes fastened on it, till suddenly Madame Nilsson's
pure soprano broke out into "M'ama, non m'ama ..."

Archer turned to the stage, where, in the familiar setting of giant
roses and pen-wiper pansies, the same large blonde victim was
succumbing to the same small brown seducer.

From the stage his eyes wandered to the point of the horseshoe where
May sat between two older ladies, just as, on that former evening, she
had sat between Mrs. Lovell Mingott and her newly-arrived "foreign"
cousin. As on that evening, she was all in white; and Archer, who had
not noticed what she wore, recognised the blue-white satin and old lace
of her wedding dress.

It was the custom, in old New York, for brides to appear in this costly
garment during the first year or two of marriage: his mother, he knew,
kept hers in tissue paper in the hope that Janey might some day wear
it, though poor Janey was rea