It was the last word; he felt that he had nothing further to urge.  He bent over her chair, seized her hand and pressed it passionately to his lips, watching with the intensest eagerness the effect of his appeal.—­There was a rustle of silk behind him, an incoming of perfumes, a light footstep.  He started, as did Alice, and beheld—­Miss Marcia Sandford!  She was tastefully dressed, as usual, and she bore herself with superb composure.  In coming from the sunlight into the semi-translucent gloom which pervades modern drawing-rooms, people are not easily recognized, and the lady swept majestically across the floor, and took a seat, without a sign of consciousness, near the couple whose conversation she had interrupted.

Not so Greenleaf; it was the most dangerous dilemma in which he had ever been placed, and he was thoroughly at a loss to know how to extricate himself.  Would that he could telegraph to Easelmann to come down, so that he could effect a decent retreat, and not leave the field in the sole possession of the enemy.  The silence was becoming embarrassing.  He was about to make some excuse for departure, when the lioness fixed her eyes upon him,—­her glance sparkling with malicious joy.  A servant entered to say that Mrs. Sandford was engaged for a few minutes, and that she wished to know the name of her visitor.

“Miss Sandford,” she replied, “and please tell her I will wait.”

Alice remembered the name, and now shared fully in Greenleaf’s embarrassment.  She watched him, therefore, keenly, while the lady began,—­

“Oh, Mr. Greenleaf, is it you?  Why didn’t you speak?  It is not worth while to keep a memory of the old disappointment.  Let bygones be bygones.  Besides, I see you know the remedy for heartbreak; if you can’t succeed where you would, you must try elsewhere.  And you seemed to be getting on very well when I came in.”

“Miss Sandford,” he retorted, indignantly, “there is as little need of your ironical condolence as of your ungenerous insinuations.”

“What an impatient fellow! and so sensitive, too!  The wound is not healed, then.  Pray introduce me to the Zerlina in our little opera.  As I know you so well, I can give her some excellent counsel about managing you.—­Ah, you wince!  I am indiscreet, I fear; I have betrayed a secret; the Zerlina is perhaps still in her rustic seclusion, and this is only—­Well, you must submit to your destiny, I suppose.  How many are there since?  Let me see,—­six weeks,—­time for three flirtations of the most intensely crimson hue.”

Alice rose to her feet, with a glow of resentment on her hitherto pale face.  And Greenleaf, feeling that courtesy was now wholly unnecessary, exclaimed,—­

“Miss Sandford, you have said quite as much as was proper for a young girl to hear:  your own cheeks, I presume, are proof against any indelicate surprise.  Let me ask you to stop, before”—­

“Before what, Sir?  And what is this high-and-mighty innocence about?  To be sure, one does not like to be exposed,—­that is, the wolf doesn’t,—­though the lamb shouldn’t be angry.  A pretty lamb it is, too.”