esome titter that illustrated all of his acidulous jokelets.

"Remember she is a lady, and a guest of your host besides," chimed in
a tall, dark man, as he joined the group. The voice was perfectly
quiet; but there seemed discomforting magnetism in the glance he
rested on one after the other, as he filled a glass and raised it to
handsome, but firm-set lips.

The three typical beaux of an abnormal civilization shifted position
uneasily. Trotter Upton pulled down his cuffs, and laboriously admired
the horse-shoe and snaffle ornamenting their buttons, as he answered:

"Sorry we shocked you, Van. Forgot it was your lecture season! But
I'll taut the curb on the boys, so socket your whip, old fel!"

"If your tact kept pace with your slang, Upton, what a success you'd
be!" Van Morris answered, carelessly. "'Tis a real pity you let the
stable monopolize so much of the time that would make you an ornament
to society." Then he set down his unfinished glass, sauntered into the
hall, and approached the subject of discussion.

Miss Rose Wood was scarcely a beauty; nor was she the youngest belle
of that ball by perhaps fifteen seasons of German cotillion. But she
had tact to her manicured finger-tips, delicate acid on her tongue's
tip, and that dangerous erudition, a brief biography of every girl in
the set, was handily stored in her capacious memory. She had,
moreover, a staunch following of gilt-plated youths who, being really
afraid of her, made her a belle as a sort of social Peter's pence.

Miss Wood had just finished a rapid "glide," when she came under fire
of the punch-room light-fighters; but, though Mr. Upton had once
judged her "a trifle touched in the wind," her complexion and her
tasteful drapery had come equally smooth out of that trying ordeal.
Even that critic finished with a nod towards her as their mentor moved
away:

"She _does_ keep her pace well! Hasn't turned a hair." And he was
right in the fact so peculiarly stated; for it was less the warmth of
the dancing-room than of her partner's urgence, that brought Miss Rose
Wood into the hall, for what Mr. Upton called "a breather."

The visible members of the Wood family were two, Miss Rose and her
father, Colonel Westchester Wood. "The Colonel" was an equally
familiar figure at the clubs and on the quarter-stretch; nor was he
chary of acceptance of the cards to dinners, balls, and opera-boxes,
which his daughter's facile management brought to the twain in
s