a look that was sweetly forgiving. "They who sin
much shall be forgiven much, you know."

"That leaves me," Mr. Lyon answered, with a laugh, "as you say over here,
out in the cold, for I have passed a too happy evening to feel like a
transgressor."

"The sins of omission are the worst sort," she retorted.

"You see what you must do to be forgiven," Henderson said to Lyon, with
that good-natured smile that was so potent to smooth away sharpness.

"I fear I can never do enough to qualify myself." And he also laughed.

"You never will," Carmen answered, but she accompanied the doubt with a
witching smile that denied it.

"What is all this about forgiveness?" asked Mrs. Eschelle, turning to
them from regarding the stage.

"Oh, we were having an experience meeting behind your back, mamma, only
Mr. Henderson won't tell his experience."

"Miss Eschelle is in such a forgiving humor tonight that she absolves
before any one has a chance to confess," he replied.

"Don't you think I am always so, Mr. Lyon?"

Mr. Lyon bowed. "I think that an opera-box with Miss Eschelle is the
easiest confessional in the world."

"That's something like a compliment. You see" (to Henderson) "how much
you Americans have to learn."

"Will you be my teacher?"

"Or your pupil," the girl said, in a low voice, standing near him as she
rose.

The play was over. In the robing and descending through the corridors
there were the usual chatter, meaning looks, confidential asides. It is
always at the last moment, in the hurry, as in a postscript, that woman
says what she means, or what for the moment she wishes to be thought to
mean. In the crowd on the main stairway the two parties saw each other at
a distance, but without speaking.

"Is it true that Lyon is 'epris' there?" Carmen whispered to Henderson
when she had scanned and thoroughly inventoried Margaret.

"You know as much as I do."

"Well, you did stay a long time," she said, in a lower tone.

As Margaret's party waited for their carriage she saw Mrs. Eschelle and
her daughter enter a shining coach, with footman and coachman in livery.
Henderson stood raising his hat. A little white hand was shaken to him
from the window, and a sweet, innocent face leaned forward--a face with
dark, eyes and golden hair, lit up with a radiant smile. That face for
the moment was New York to Margaret, and New York seemed a vain show.

Carmen threw herself back in her seat as if weary. Mrs. Eschelle sa