this hideous hour. "A quarter past ten? I
might look in there now; the Fisher evenings are amusing. I haven't kept
you up too late, Gerty? You look tired--I've rambled on and bored you."
And in the unwonted overflow of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss
upon her cheek.

At Mrs. Fisher's, through the cigar-smoke of the studio, a dozen voices
greeted Selden. A song was pending as he entered, and he dropped into a
seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search of Miss Bart. But she
was not there, and the discovery gave him a pang out of all proportion to
its seriousness; since the note in his breast-pocket assured him that at
four the next day they would meet. To his impatience it seemed
immeasurably long to wait, and half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned to
Mrs. Fisher to ask, as the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with
her.

"Lily? She's just gone. She had to run off, I forget where. Wasn't she
wonderful last night?"

"Who's that? Lily?" asked Jack Stepney, from the depths of a neighbouring
arm-chair. "Really, you know, I'm no prude, but when it comes to a girl
standing there as if she was up at auction--I thought seriously of
speaking to cousin Julia."

"You didn't know Jack had become our social censor?" Mrs. Fisher said to
Selden with a laugh; and Stepney spluttered, amid the general derision:
"But she's a cousin, hang it, and when a man's married--TOWN TALK was
full of her this morning."

"Yes: lively reading that was," said Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, stroking his
moustache to hide the smile behind it. "Buy the dirty sheet? No, of
course not; some fellow showed it to me--but I'd heard the stories
before. When a girl's as good-looking as that she'd better marry; then no
questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized society there is no
provision as yet for the young woman who claims the privileges of
marriage without assuming its obligations."

"Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of Mr.
Rosedale," Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh.

"Rosedale--good heavens!" exclaimed Van Alstyne, dropping his eye-glass.
"Stepney, that's your fault for foisting the brute on us."

"Oh, confound it, you know, we don't MARRY Rosedale in our family,"
Stepney languidly protested; but his wife, who sat in oppressive bridal
finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the judicial
reflection: "In Lily's circumstances it's a mistake to have too high a
standard."

"I hear even Rose