“Go to your house to learn dancing!” echoed he.  “Folks would be for putting me into a lunatic asylum.  If I do find an hour to myself any odd evening, I have to get to my dissection.  I went shares the other day in a beautiful subject——­”

“I don’t think you need tell me of that, Jan,” interrupted Lady Mary, keeping her countenance.

“I wonder you talk to him, Mary,” observed Lady Verner, feeling thoroughly ashamed of Jan, and believing that everybody else did.  “You hear how he repays you.  He means it for good breeding, perhaps.”

“I don’t mean it for rudeness, at any rate,” returned Jan.  “Lady Mary knows that.  Don’t you?” he added, turning to her.

A strangely thrilling expression in her eyes as she looked at him was her only answer.  “I would rather have that sort of rudeness from you, Jan,” said she, “than the world’s hollow politeness.  There is so much of false——­”

Mary Elmsley’s sentence was never concluded.  What was it that had broken in upon them?  What object was that, gliding into the room like a ghost, on whom all eyes were strained with a terrible fascination? Was it a ghost?  It appeared ghastly enough for one.  Was it one of Jan’s “subjects” come after him to the ball?  Was it a corpse?  It looked more like that than anything else.  A corpse bedizened with jewels.

“She’s mad!” exclaimed Jan, who was the first to recover his speech.

“What is it?” ejaculated Sir Edmund, gazing with something very like fear, as the spectre bore down towards him.

“It is my brother’s wife,” explained Jan.  “You may see how fit she is to come.”

There was no time for more.  Sibylla had her hand held out to Sir Edmund, a wan smile on her ghastly face.  His hesitation, his evident discomposure, as he took it, were not lost upon her.

“You have forgotten me, Sir Edmund; but I should have known you anywhere.  Your face is bronzed, and it is the only change.  Am I so much changed?”

“Yes, you are; greatly changed,” was his involuntary acknowledgment in his surprise.  “I should not have recognised you for the Sibylla West of those old days.”

“I was at an age to change,” she said.  “I——­”

The words were stopped by a fit of coughing.  Not the ordinary cough, more or less violent, that we hear in every-day intercourse; but the dreadful cough that tells its tale of the hopeless state within.  She had discarded her opera-cloak, and stood there, her shoulders, back, neck, all bare and naked; tres decolletee, as the French would say; shivering palpably; imparting the idea of a skeleton with rattling bones.  Sir Edmund Hautley, quitting Decima, took her hand compassionately and led her to a seat.

Mrs. Verner did not like the attention.  Pity, compassion was in every line of his face—­in every gesture of his gentle hand; and she resented it.

“I am not ill,” she declared to Sir Edmund between the paroxysms of her distressing cough.  “The wind seemed to take my throat as I got out of the fly, and it is making me cough a little, but I am not ill.  Has Jan been telling you that I am?”