u will laugh at me," began she, while a sudden blush
flitted over her countenance. "But this is my first ball, and I feel as
if I had rushed into a whirlpool, from which I have, since the first
rash plunge was made, been vainly trying to escape. I feel so
dreadfully forlorn. I hardly know anybody here except my cousin, who
invited me, and I hardly think I know him either."
"Well, since you are irredeemably committed," replied Ralph, as the
music, after some prefatory flourishes, broke into the delicious rhythm
of a Strauss waltz, "then it is no use struggling against fate. Come,
let us make the plunge together. Misery loves company."
He offered her his arm, and she rose, somewhat hesitatingly, and
followed.
"I am afraid," she whispered, as they fell into line with the
procession that was moving down the long hall, "that you have asked me
to dance merely because I said I felt forlorn. If that is the case, I
should prefer to be led back to my seat."
"What a base imputation!" cried Ralph.
There was something so charmingly _naive_ in this
self-depreciation--something so altogether novel in his experience,
and, he could not help adding, just a little bit countrified. His
spirits rose; he began to relish keenly his position as an experienced
man of the world, and, in the agreeable glow of patronage and conscious
superiority, chatted with hearty _abandon_ with his little rustic
beauty.
"If your dancing is as perfect as your German ex1-ercises were," said
she, laughing, as they swung out upon the floor, "then I promise myself
a good deal of pleasure from our meeting."
"Never fear," answered he, quickly reversing his step, and whirling
with many a capricious turn away among the thronging couples.
When Ralph drove home in his carriage toward morning he briefly summed
up his impressions of Bertha in the following adjectives: intelligent,
delightfully unsophisticated, a little bit verdant, but devilish
pretty.
Some weeks later Colonel Grim received an appointment at the fortress
of Aggershuus, and immediately took up his residence in the capital. He
saw that his son cut a fine figure in the highest circles of society,
and expressed his gratification in the most emphatic terms. If he had
known, however, that Ralph was in the habit of visiting, with alarming
regularity, at the house of a plebeian merchant in a somewhat obscure
street, he would, no doubt, have been more chary of his praise. But the
Colonel suspect
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