bustle about. "You don't know what
a packer I am."

"I knew it must come some time," she was saying, with a weary air, as she
followed with her eyes the light step of the graceful girl, who was
beginning to sort things and to bring order out of the confusion, holding
up one article after another and asking questions with an enforced
cheerfulness that was more pathetic than any burst of grief.

"Yes, I know. There, that is laid in smooth." She pretended to be
thinking what to put in next, and suddenly she threw herself into
McDonald's lap and began to talk gayly. "It is all my fault, dear; I
should have stayed little. And it doesn't make any difference.
I know you love me, and oh, McDonald, I love you more, a hundred times
more, than ever. If you did not love me! Think how dreadful that would
be. And we shall not be separated-only by streets, don't you know. They
can't separate us. I know you want me to be brave. And some day,
perhaps" (and she whispered in her ear--how many hundred times had she
told her girl secrets in that way!), "if I do have a home of my own,
then--"

It was not very cheerful talk, however it seemed to be, but it was better
than silence, and in the midst of it, with many interruptions, the
packing was over, and some sort of serenity was attained even by Miss
McDonald. "Yes, dear heart, we have love and trust and hope."
But when the preparations were all made, and Evelyn went to her own room,
there did not seem to be so much hope, nor any brightness in the midst of
this first great catastrophe of her life.

XXII

The great Mavick ball at Newport, in the summer long remembered for its
financial disasters, was very much talked about at the time. Long after,
in any city club, a man was sure to have attentive listeners if he, began
his story or his gossip with the remark that he was at the Mavick ball.

It attracted great attention, both on account of the circumstances that
preceded it and the events which speedily followed, and threw a light
upon it that gave it a spectacular importance. The city journals made a
feature of it. They summoned their best artists to illustrate it, and
illuminate it in pen-and-ink, half-tones, startling colors, and
photographic reproductions, sketches theatrical, humorous, and poetic,
caricatures, pictures of tropical luxury and aristocratic pretension; in
short, all the bewildering affluence of modern art which is brought to
bear upon the aesthetic cultivation