“About it?  About what!”

“You coyness—­or absence of coyness.  Will they say that you threw yourself at his head?”

(As a matter of fact, as is already known, that is just what the majority of the guests did say about her.)

Phyllis reddened and seemed—­for a moment or two—­almost angry.  Then she made a little gesture, expressive of indifference, as she cried: 

“After all, what does it matter what they said?  I don’t care about them.  It is for you I care, Ella—­you, only you.”

“Heavens! how seriously you say that!” cried Ella.  “There’s no cause for seriousness, I hope, even if you do care a great deal for me, which I know you do.  If you said so much to a man,—­say, Herbert Courtland,—­it would be quite another matter.  There would be sufficient cause for seriousness then.  But you didn’t say so much to him.  He ran away before you could say it.”

“Oh, Ella! please don’t talk in that way.  It is not like yourself to talk in that way.”

“How do you know what is like myself and what is not?  You have only seen one side of me, and I don’t think that you have understood even what you have seen.  Great Heavens! how could I expect that you should.  Not until within a few months ago had I myself any idea that my nature was made up of more than one element.  Do you fancy now that you will always be in the future as you have been in the past?  The same placid, sweet English girl, with serious thoughts at times about your own soul and other people’s souls? a maiden living with her feet only touching the common clay of this earth?  Wait until your hour comes—­your hour of love; your hour of fate; your hour of self-abandonment, and pray to your God that you may come through it as well as I came through mine.”

“Ella, dearest Ella!”

“You know nothing of that hour—­that terrible hour!  Wait until it comes to you before you think a word of evil against any woman that lives in the world.  Wait until your hour of jealousy comes—­wait until you find that your hair is turning gray.  The most tragical moment in a woman’s life is when she finds that the gray hairs will not be kept back.  That is the time when she thinks of Heaven most seriously.  I have not yet found a single gray hair in my head, but I have suffered all else; and I have been an astonishment to myself—­as I have been to you more than once before now, and as I certainly am to you at the present moment.”

She had spoken at first with quivering lips, her fingers interlaced, her eyes flashing.  She had sprung from her seat and had begun to pace the room just as she had paced Phyllis’ drawing room on that night when she had missed the performance of “Romeo and Juliet,” but she ended with a laugh, which was meant to make a mock of the seriousness of her impassioned words, but which only had the effect of emphasizing her passion in the ears of the girl.

While she was still lying back, laughing, in the chair into which she had thrown herself once more, Phyllis went to her and knelt at her feet, taking her hands just as Herbert had taken her hands in the evening when he had knelt at her feet in her own house after the little dinner at Mr. Ayrton’s.