“Oh ho! it’s the way with all young men, marm.  I always sez to ma she needn’t fret her gizzard.  Young men will sow their wild oats.  Oh, ’tain’t nothin’.  Mr. Newt knows that werry well.  Every man do.”

He watched Mrs. Newt’s expression as he spoke.  She answered,

“I don’t know about that; but Mr. Newt shakes his head dismally nowadays about something or other, and he’s really grown old.”

In uttering these words Mrs. Newt had sealed the fate of a large offering for discount made that very day by Boniface Newt, Son, & Co.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

ANOTHER TURN IN THE WALTZ.

The music streamed through the rooms in the soft, yearning, lingering, passionate, persuasive measures of a waltz.  Arthur Merlin had been very intently watching Hope Wayne, because he saw Abel Newt approaching with Mrs. Van Kraut, and he wished to catch the first look of Hope upon seeing him.

Mrs. Bleecker Van Kraut, when she waltzed, was simply a circular advertisement of the Van Kraut property.  Her slow rising and falling motion displayed the family jewels to the utmost advantage.  The same insolent smoothness and finish prevailed in the whole performance.  It was almost as perfect as the Paris toys which you wind up, and which spin smoothly round upon the table.  Abel Newt, conscious master of the dance and chief of brilliant youth, waltzed with an air of delicate deference toward his partner, and, gay defiance toward the rest of the world.

The performance was so novel and so well executed that the ball instantly became a spectacle of which Abel and Mrs. Van Kraut were the central figures.  The crowd pressed around them, and Abel gently pushed them back in his fluctuating circles.  Short ladies in the back-ground stood upon chairs for a moment to get a better view; while Mrs. Dagon and Mrs. Orry, whom no dexterous waltzer would ever clasp in the dizzy whirl, spattered their neighborhood with epithets of contempt and indignation, thanking Heaven that in their day things had not quite come to such a pass as that.  Colonel Burr himself, my dears, never dared to touch more than the tips of his partner’s fingers in the contra-dance.

Hope Wayne had not met Abel Newt since they had parted after the runaway at Delafield, except in his mother’s conservatory, and when she was stepping from the carriage.  In the mean while she had been learning every thing at once.

As her eyes fell upon him now she remembered that day upon the lawn at Pinewood, when he stood suddenly beside her, casting a shadow upon the page she was reading.  The handsome boy had grown into this proud, gallant, gay young man, surrounded by that social prestige which gives graceful confidence to the bearing of any man.  He knew that Hope had heard of his social success; but he could not justly estimate its effect upon her.