with a light laugh--"why, of course you are! Besides, what
could harm you? Of whom are you afraid? Your friend, my wife, Sybil? She
is your friend, and would do you only good."

Rosa Blondelle slowly shook her head, murmuring:

"No, Lyon, your wife is not my friend--she is my deadly enemy. She is
fiercely jealous of your affection for me, though it is the only
happiness of my unhappy life. And she will make you throw me off yet."

"Never! no one, not even my wife, shall ever do that! I swear it by all
my hopes of--"

"Hush! do not swear, for she will make you break your oath. She is your
wife. She will make you forsake me, or--she will do me a fatal mischief.
Oh, I shiver whenever she comes near me. Ah, if you had seen her eyes
as I saw them through her mask to-night. They were lambent flames! How
they glared on me, those terrible eyes!"

"It was your fancy, dear Rosa; no more than that. Come, shake off all
this gloom and terror from your spirit, and be your lovely and sprightly
self!"

"But I cannot! oh, I cannot! I feel the burning of her terrible eyes
upon me now."

"But she is not even in the room."

(Here Sybil slipped away to a short distance, and joined a group of
masks as if she belonged to them.)

"But I shiver as if she were near me now."

Lyon Berners suddenly looked around and then laughed, saying:

"But there is no one near you, dear Rosa, except Death."

"Death!" she echoed with a start and a shudder.

"Why, how excessively nervous you are, dear Rosa," said Lyon Berners
laying his hand soothingly upon her shoulder.

"Oh, but just reflect what you have just said to me. 'No one near me but
Death!' Death near me!" she repeated, trembling.

"Poor child, are you superstitious as well as nervous? It was the mask I
meant. The mask that was Sybil's partner in the quadrille which we
danced with them," laughed Lyon Berners.

"Oh, yes, I know. And they stood opposite to us. So that we danced with
them more than with any one else! And my own hand turned cold every time
it had to touch his. What a ghastly mask!"

"Yes, indeed. I wonder any man should choose such a one," added Lyon.

"Who is he? Who is that mask?"

"Indeed I do not know. Some one among our invited guests, of course.
But he maintains his incognito so successfully, that even I, who have
discovered most people in the room, have not been able to detect his
identity. However, at supper all will unmask, and we shall see who he
is."