ittle laugh rippling over her
smiling lips, although she blushed beneath the woman's searching look.
"Don't you think that excitement is sometimes infectious?--and surely
everybody has been active and gay for days. I like to see people happy,
and then the morning is perfectly lovely."

Truly the world was all _couleur de rose_ to her since love's elixir had
given a new impetus to her heart-pulses!

Mrs. Montague frowned slightly, for somehow the girl's unusual mood
annoyed her.

She could not forget her exceeding loveliness on Saturday evening, when
she had been arrayed in the festal robe which she herself was to wear at
the ball, and the memory of it nettled her.

Perhaps, she thought, Ruth remembered it also, and was secretly exulting
over the fact of her own beauty. Exceedingly vain herself, she was quick
to suspect vanity in others, and this thought only increased her
irritation.

"I'd give a great deal if she wasn't so pretty; and--and that style of
beauty always annoys me," she said to herself, with a feeling of angry
impatience.

And giving a sudden twitch to a delicate ruffle, which she had begun to
arrange upon the corsage of a dress, to show Mona how she wanted it, she
made a great rugged tear in the filmy fabric, thus completely ruining the
frill.

This only served to increase her ill humor.

"There! now I cannot wear this dress at dinner to-day," she cried,
flushing angrily over the mishap, "for the frill is ruined."

"Haven't you something else that you can use in its place?" Mona quietly
asked.

"No; nothing looks as well on this corsage as these wide, fleecy frills
of _crape lisse_. It is the only dress, too, that I have not already worn
here, and I was depending upon it for to-day," was the irritable
response.

Mona thought she had plenty of laces and ruffles that would have answered
very well, and which might easily have been substituted, but she did not
think it best to make any further suggestions to her in her present mood.

"I know what I can do," Mrs. Montague continued, after a moment, in a
milder tone. "I saw some ruffling very nearly like this in a milliner's
window at Rhinebeck, when I was out riding on Saturday. There are some
other little things that I shall want for this evening, and you may take
a walk by and by to get them for me."

Rhinebeck was a full mile away, and Mrs. Montague could easily have
arranged to have Mona ride, for a carriage was sent every morning for the