“Will you do a galop with me presently?—­if you don’t get a better partner, I mean,” said Master Thayne.

“That wouldn’t be much of a promise,” answered Leslie, smiling.  “I will, at any rate; that is, if—­after I’ve spoken to Mrs. Linceford.”

Mr. Wharne came up and said something to young Thayne, just then; and the latter turned eagerly to Leslie.  “The telescope’s fixed, out on the balcony; and you can see Jupiter and three of his moons!  We must make haste, before our moon’s up.”

“Will you go and look, Mrs. Linceford?” asked Mr. Wharne of the lady, as Leslie reached her side.

They went with him, and Master Thayne followed.  Jeannie and Elinor and the Miss Thoresbys were doing the inevitable promenade after the dance,—­under difficulties.

“Who is your young friend?” inquired Mrs. Linceford, with a shade of doubt in her whisper, as they came out on the balcony.

“Master”—­Leslie began to introduce, but stopped.  The name, which she had not been quite certain of, escaped her.

“My name is Dakie Thayne,” said the boy, with a bow to the matron.

“Now, Mrs. Linceford, if you’ll just sit here,” said Mr. Wharne, placing a chair.  “I suppose I ought to have come to you first; but it’s all right,” he added, in a low tone, over her shoulder.  “He’s a nice boy.”

And Mrs. Linceford put her eye to the telescope.  “Dakie Thayne!  It’s a queer name; and yet it seems as if I had heard it before,” she said, looking away through the mystic tube into space, and seeing Jupiter with his moons, in a fair round picture framed expressly to her eye; yet sending a thought, at the same time, up and down the lists of a mental directory, trying to place Dakie Thayne among people she had heard of.

“I’ll be responsible for the name,” answered Marmaduke Wharne.

“‘Dakie’ is a nickname, of course; but they always call me so, and I like it best,” the boy was explaining to Leslie, while they waited in the doorway.

Then her turn came.  Leslie had never looked through a telescope upon the stars before.  She forgot the galop, and the piano tinkled out its gayest notes unheard.  “It seems like coming all the way back,” she said, when she moved away for Dakie Thayne.

Then they wheeled the telescope upon its pivot eastward, and met our own moon coming up, as if in a grand jealousy, to assert herself within her small domain, and put out faint, far satellites of lordlier planets.  They looked upon her mystic, glistening hill-tops, and down her awful craters; and from these they seemed to drop a little, as a bird might, and alight on the earth-mountains looming close at hand, with their huge, rough crests and sides, and sheer escarpments white with nakedness; and so—­got home again.  Leslie, with her maps and gazetteer, had done no traveling like this.

She would not have cared, if she had known, that Imogen Thoresby was looking for her within, to present, at his own request, the cavalry captain.  She did not know in the least, absorbed in her pure enjoyment, that Marmaduke Wharne was deliberately trying her, and confirming his estimate of her, in these very things.