She again sent him a grave, questioning look, and began to gaze intently upon the stone in her bracelet.

“I suppose you will laugh at me,” began she, while a sudden blush flitted over her countenance.  “But this is my first ball, and I feel as if I had rushed into a whirlpool, from which I have, since the first rash plunge was made, been vainly trying to escape.  I feel so dreadfully forlorn.  I hardly know anybody here except my cousin, who invited me, and I hardly think I know him either.”

“Well, since you are irredeemably committed,” replied Ralph, as the music, after some prefatory flourishes, broke into the delicious rhythm of a Strauss waltz, “then it is no use struggling against fate.  Come, let us make the plunge together.  Misery loves company.”

He offered her his arm, and she rose, somewhat hesitatingly, and followed.

“I am afraid,” she whispered, as they fell into line with the procession that was moving down the long hall, “that you have asked me to dance merely because I said I felt forlorn.  If that is the case, I should prefer to be led back to my seat.”

“What a base imputation!” cried Ralph.

There was something so charmingly naive in this self-depreciation—­something so altogether novel in his experience, and, he could not help adding, just a little bit countrified.  His spirits rose; he began to relish keenly his position as an experienced man of the world, and, in the agreeable glow of patronage and conscious superiority, chatted with hearty abandon with his little rustic beauty.

“If your dancing is as perfect as your German ex1-ercises were,” said she, laughing, as they swung out upon the floor, “then I promise myself a good deal of pleasure from our meeting.”

“Never fear,” answered he, quickly reversing his step, and whirling with many a capricious turn away among the thronging couples.

When Ralph drove home in his carriage toward morning he briefly summed up his impressions of Bertha in the following adjectives:  intelligent, delightfully unsophisticated, a little bit verdant, but devilish pretty.

Some weeks later Colonel Grim received an appointment at the fortress of Aggershuus, and immediately took up his residence in the capital.  He saw that his son cut a fine figure in the highest circles of society, and expressed his gratification in the most emphatic terms.  If he had known, however, that Ralph was in the habit of visiting, with alarming regularity, at the house of a plebeian merchant in a somewhat obscure street, he would, no doubt, have been more chary of his praise.  But the Colonel suspected nothing, and it was well for the peace of the family that he did not.  It may have been cowardice in Ralph that he never mentioned Bertha’s name to his family or to his aristocratic acquaintances; for, to be candid, he himself felt ashamed of the power she exerted over him, and by turns pitied and ridiculed