“Don’t ask me now, Peggy,—­don’t, that’s a dear; I can’t stand any more now.”

And then and there Peggy answered, “I won’t, I won’t, you dear Tilly; I won’t say another thing about it, and we won’t think about it—­” And then and there “Tum, tum, ti tum” burst forth the band in Strauss’s “Morgen Blaetter” waltzes.

“Oh, how I love the ‘Morgen Blaetter!’” cried Peggy.  “Come, let us get into the dancing-hall as soon as possible.  Where’s auntie?  Oh, there she is, talking with your pretty grandmother.”

The next minute auntie and grandmother were sitting side by side in the dancing-hall, watching the two girls as they kept step to that perfect waltz music.

“Isn’t it just lovely!” sighed Peggy.

“Lovely!” echoed Tilly.

“And how we suit each other! our steps are just alike.”

“Just alike,” echoed Tilly; whereat they both laughed, and a little silence between them followed, and then—­

“There’s Agnes dancing with Tom Raymond,” suddenly exclaimed Tilly.  “I wonder—­”

“Don’t wonder or worry about Agnes now, when we are tuned to the ’Morgen Blaetter’ music,” said Peggy. “’Music has charms to soothe the savage breast,’ somebody has written, you know; and—­and,” with a soft little laugh, “it may soothe the breast of this savage Agnes.”

Tilly echoed the soft little laugh, but she could not dismiss Agnes from her mind.  She could not cease to wonder what it was she was talking about so earnestly with Tom Raymond,—­to wonder if she had told, or was telling him at that very moment, of “Smithson, alias Smith.”

And while poor Tilly wondered and worried, there was Peggy, the unconscious centre of all the wonder and worry, lifting up a radiant face of enjoyment as she floated along to the music of the “Morgen Blaetter.”  Tom Raymond, catching sight of this radiant face, said to himself,—­

“I wonder if she’s engaged for the next dance.  I’ll ask her the minute this is over.”

The two girls were standing near their two chaperones when Tom came up, and with an odd sort of shyness, asked,—­

“Are you engaged for the next dance, Miss—­Miss Smith?”

Tilly’s heart gave a jump as she noted Tom’s sudden confusion and hesitation at this “Miss Smith,” for it brought back to her his strange expression at the first sight of Peggy, and his question, “Is that the girl—­the Miss Smith you were talking about?” and then his odd, chuckling laugh.

Peggy, too, had regarded Tom at that moment with a puzzled observation, as if she wondered if she had seen him before; and now, as Tom hesitated and bungled at the “Miss Smith,” Peggy’s own manner showed signs of consciousness, if not of embarrassment.  Oh, oh! what could it all mean but that he had known everything from the first?  “And I fancied at the first he acted as he did because he thought she wasn’t quite fine enough; and all the time he knew she was this Miss Smithson, and was keeping it to himself, and, knowing that, he’s going to ask her to dance with him now!  Oh, what a good fellow he is, and what injustice I’ve done him!” concluded Tilly.  “If only Will now, when he finds out—­”