Nor could all the appeals over the telegraph move him, though that day and the next the wires to Newport from New York and Syracuse were kept hot, the despatches came so continuously.

Two days after this decision, Peter and Leonore went to a cotillion.  Leonore informed him that:  “Mamma makes me leave after supper, because she doesn’t like me to stay late, so I miss the nice part.”

“How many waltzes are you going to give me?” asked Peter, with an eye to his one ball-room accomplishment.

“I’ll give you the first,” said Leonore, “and then if you’ll sit near me, I’ll give you a look every time I see a man coming whom I don’t like, and if you are quick and ask me first, I’ll give it to you.”

Peter became absolutely happy.  “How glad I am,” he thought, “that I didn’t go to Syracuse!  What a shame it is there are other dances than waltzes.”

But after Peter had had two waltzes, he overheard his aged friend of fifteen years say something to a girl that raised him many degrees in his mind.  “That’s a very brainy fellow,” said Peter admiringly.  “That never occurred to me!”

So he waited till he saw Leonore seated, and then joined her.  “Won’t you sit out this dance with me?” he asked.

Leonore looked surprised.  “He’s getting very clever,” she thought, never dreaming that Peter’s cleverness, like so many other people’s nowadays, consisted in a pertinent use of quotations.  Parrot cleverness, we might term it.  Leonore listened to the air which the musicians were beginning, and finding it the Lancers, or dreariest of dances, she made Peter happy by assenting.

“Suppose we go out on the veranda,” said Peter, still quoting.

“Now of what are you going to talk?” said Leonore, when they were ensconced on a big wicker divan, in the soft half light of the Chinese lanterns.

“I want to tell you of something that seems to me about a hundred years ago,” said Peter.  “But it concerns myself, and I don’t want to bore you.”

“Try, and if I don’t like it I’ll stop you,” said Leonore, opening up a line of retreat worthy of a German army.

“I don’t know what you’ll think about it,” said Peter, faltering a little.  “I suppose I can hardly make you understand it, as it is to me.  But I want you to know, because—­well—­it’s only fair.”

Leonore looked at Peter with a very tender look in her eyes.  He could not see it, because Leonore sat so that her face was in shadow.  But she could see his expression, and when he hesitated, with that drawn look on his face, Leonore said softly: 

“You mean—­about—­mamma?”

Peter started.  “Yes!  You know?”

“Yes,” said Leonore gently.  “And that was why I trusted you, without ever having met you, and why I wanted to be friends.”

Peter sighed a sigh of relief.  “I’ve been so afraid of it,” he said.  “She told you?”

“Yes.  That is, Miss De Voe told me first of your having been disappointed, so I asked mamma if she knew the girl, and then mamma told me.  I’m glad you spoke of it, for I’ve wanted to ask you something.”