n Blaetter!'" cried Peggy. "Come, let us get
into the dancing-hall as soon as possible. Where's auntie? Oh, there she
is, talking with your pretty grandmother."

The next minute auntie and grandmother were sitting side by side in the
dancing-hall, watching the two girls as they kept step to that perfect
waltz music.

"Isn't it just lovely!" sighed Peggy.

"Lovely!" echoed Tilly.

"And how we suit each other! our steps are just alike."

"Just alike," echoed Tilly; whereat they both laughed, and a little
silence between them followed, and then--

"There's Agnes dancing with Tom Raymond," suddenly exclaimed Tilly. "I
wonder--"

"Don't wonder or worry about Agnes now, when we are tuned to the 'Morgen
Blaetter' music," said Peggy. "'Music has charms to soothe the savage
breast,' somebody has written, you know; and--and," with a soft little
laugh, "it may soothe the breast of this savage Agnes."

Tilly echoed the soft little laugh, but she could not dismiss Agnes from
her mind. She could not cease to wonder what it was she was talking
about so earnestly with Tom Raymond,--to wonder if she had told, or was
telling him at that very moment, of "Smithson, alias Smith."

And while poor Tilly wondered and worried, there was Peggy, the
unconscious centre of all the wonder and worry, lifting up a radiant
face of enjoyment as she floated along to the music of the "Morgen
Blaetter." Tom Raymond, catching sight of this radiant face, said to
himself,--

"I wonder if she's engaged for the next dance. I'll ask her the minute
this is over."

The two girls were standing near their two chaperones when Tom came up,
and with an odd sort of shyness, asked,--

"Are you engaged for the next dance, Miss--Miss Smith?"

Tilly's heart gave a jump as she noted Tom's sudden confusion and
hesitation at this "Miss Smith," for it brought back to her his strange
expression at the first sight of Peggy, and his question, "Is that the
girl--the Miss Smith you were talking about?" and then his odd,
chuckling laugh.

Peggy, too, had regarded Tom at that moment with a puzzled observation,
as if she wondered if she had seen him before; and now, as Tom hesitated
and bungled at the "Miss Smith," Peggy's own manner showed signs of
consciousness, if not of embarrassment. Oh, oh! what could it all mean
but that he had known everything from the first? "And I fancied at the
first he acted as he did because he thought she wasn't quite fine
enough; and a