r."

My arm was already around the pink tarlatan waist of my partner, the
crown of azaleas had brushed my shoulder like a gentle caress, and I had
whirled halfway down the room in triumphant agony, when a floating
phrase uttered in a girlish voice entered my ears and carried confusion
into my brain.

"Get out of the way. Doesn't Bessy look for all the world like a
rose-bush uprooted by a whirlwind?"

I caught the words as I went, and they proved too much for the trembling
balance of my self-confidence. My strained gaze, fixed on the glassy
surface beneath my feet, plunged suddenly downward amid the reflected
roses and lamps. The music went wild and out of tune on the air. My
blood beat violently in my pulses, I made a single false step, tripped
over a flounce of pink tarlatan, which seemed to shriek as I went down,
and the next instant my partner and I were flat on the polished floor,
clutching desperately for support at the mirrored roses beneath.

The wreck lasted only a minute. A single suppressed titter fell on my
ears, and was instantly checked. I looked up in time to see a smile
freeze on Miss Mitty's face, and melt immediately into an expression of
sympathy. The pretty girl, with the crown of azalea hanging awry on her
flaxen tresses, and her flounce of pink tarlatan held disconsolately in
her hand, looked for one dreadful instant as if she were about to burst
into tears. A few dancers had stopped and gathered sympathetically
around us, but the rest were happily whirling on, while the music, after
a piercing crescendo, came breathlessly to a pause amid a silence that I
felt to be far louder than sound. The perspiration, forced out by inward
agony, stood in drops on my forehead, and as I wiped it away, I said
almost defiantly:--

"It was the fault of George Bolingbroke. I told him I didn't know how to
dance."

"I think I'd better go home," murmured the heroine of the disaster,
catching her lower lip in her teeth to bite back a sob, "I wonder where
mamma can be?"

"Here, dear," responded a commiserating voice, and I was about to turn
away in disgrace without a further apology, when the little circle
around us divided with a flutter, and Sally appeared, leaning on the arm
of a youth with bulging eyes and a lantern jaw.

"Go home, Bessy? Why, how silly!" she exclaimed, and her energetic voice
seemed suddenly to dominate the situation. "It wasn't so many years ago,
I'm sure, that you used to tumble for the p