of the entertainment, the excellence of the supper, the affability of the Prince, etc.

In one of the intervals between two of these fragments of conversation she perceives that her charge has left her side; but it requires no very distant excursion of the eye to discover her standing at the supper-table, an ice in her hand, having, by the agency of one of her just-made acquaintance, effected an introduction to a good-looking undergraduate, who in return is presenting to her a second, who in his turn will obviously present to her a third and a fourth.

A little mob of young men is beginning to gather round her. A moment more, and, her ice finished, followed by her cortège, Sarah returns to her sister, winking so deftly as to be invisible to the outer world as she comes.

Belinda," she says, I want to introduce to you Mr. Bellairs, who tells me that he plays tennis remarkably well" (an indistinct disclaimer from the blushing Bellairs); "and Mr. Stanley, who plays very nicely

too; and Mr. De Lisle, who thinks he would play very nicely if he had a little more practice."

Belinda laughs slightly, amused at the glibness with which her sister has already mastered her new admirers' names.

She has risen to her feet again—Professor Forth's wife-the stern-faced beauty whom in their walks and talks the boys have often with distant awe admired.

"I am sure," she says, with a sweet cold smile, "that if you care to try our small ground, I shall be very

She is a tall woman, and her eyes are on a level with Bellairs'. She can, therefore, easily look over his shoulder. What sight is it so seen that makes her stop suddenly in mid-speech, with a catch in her breath? The pause is but short. Almost before her auditors have had time to notice the hiatus, it is filled up.

"I shall be very happy to see you any day you choose to come-to-morrow, any day!"

Her words are perfectly collected; but

VOL. II.

32

surely she is far, far paler than she was when she began to speak; and though her sentences are addressed to the young men, her eyes are wandering oddly beyond them. Upon my soul, I believe the woman is off her head!" Stanley says confidentially to Bellairs, as they walk home together in the moonlight. "Did you notice her eyes when she was talking to us? they made me feel quite jumpy!"

"Off her head!" growls Bellairs, who finds it not impossible to combine a poignant interest in Sarah with a servile mothand-candle-like homage to the elder and severer beauty; "so would you be, if you were married to an old mummy!"

A

CHAPTER III.

ND what was it Mrs. Forth saw over Bellairs' shoulder? What

is the sight that, now that the temporary call upon her attention is withdrawn, is riveting into such an agony of search the lovely cold eyes, to which so few things seem worth looking at? Fortunately for her, a new batch of undergraduates has hurried up to be presented to Sarah. Never since the days of Dresden and the German army has Miss Churchill had her hands so full. Belinda is free to send her gaze unnoticed round the hall, in a silent, breathless, passionate quest. Quest of what? She does not ask herself how much the better off. she will be if she

succeeds in finding the object of that quest.

To find it! to find it!

the finding, to find it!

Come what may of
Most people would

feel sure that she has been deceived by an accidental resemblance to Rivers in some stranger; men of his size, complexion and bearing being, though unhappily in a minority, yet still numerous among two thousand youths of the English upper classes. But Belinda would laugh to scorn the suggestion that at any distance, or in any glimpse however momentary, she could have mistaken any other for him.

There exists in her mind no smallest doubt that the face seen in that one lightning-flash, and then instantly hidden by twenty other intervening faces, was hishis or his angel's! Perhaps he is dead, and that he has come to tell her. A mute sob rises in her throat. Whether in the spirit or the body, she must find him! At intervals of every few minutes she is interrupted in her search by the greetings and observations of passing acquaintances. She answers them politely and connectedly, but