Ella laughed loud and long with her head thrown back on the cushion of the sofa, and the diamonds in her hair giving back flash for flash to the electric candles above her head.  “Yes; I was at home—­I dined at home, and, God knows why, I conceived a sudden desire to go to the opera,—­Melba is the Juliet,—­and forgetting that you were engaged to the Earlscourts—­you told me last week that you were going, but I stupidly forgot, I drove across here to ask you to be my companion.  Oh, yes, I have been here since—­since nine, mind that! nine—­nine—­ask the servants.  When I heard that you were dining out I thought that I was lost—­one cannot drive about the streets all night, can one?  Ah!  I thought that God was against me now, as he ever has been; and as for my guardian angel—­ah! our guardian angels are worse than the servants of nowadays who have no sense of responsibility.  Thompson, your butler, is worth a whole heavenful of angels, for it was he who asked me if I would come in and wait for your return—­ask him, if you doubt my word.”

“Good Heavens, Ella, what do you say?  Doubt your word—­I doubt your word?  You wound me deeply.”

“Forgive me, my Phyllis.  I don’t quite know what I said.  Ah, let me nestle here—­here.”  She had put her head down to Phyllis’ bare neck and was looking up to her face as a child might have done.  “There is no danger here.  Now pet me, and say that you forgive me for having said whatever I did say.”

Phyllis laughed and put her lips down among the myriad diamonds that glowed amid the other’s hair, like stars seen among the thick foliage of a copper beech.

“I forgive you for whatever you said,” she cried.  “I, too, have forgotten what it was; but you must never say so again.  But had you really no engagement for to-night that you took that fancy for going to ’Romeo’?”

“No engagement?  Had I no engagement, do you ask me?” cried Ella.  “Oh, yes, yes!  I had an engagement, but I broke it—­I broke it—­I broke it, and that is why I am here.  Whatever may come of it, I am here, and here I mean to stay.  I am safe here.  At home I am in danger.”

Phyllis wondered greatly what had come to her friend to make her talk in this wild strain.

“Where were you engaged?” she inquired casually.  She had come to the conclusion that there was safety in the commonplace:  she would not travel out of the region of commonplaces with Ella in her present state.

“Where was I engaged?  Surely I told you.  Didn’t I say something about the opera—­’Romeo and Juliet’?—­that was to be the place, but I came to you instead.  Ah, what have we missed!  Was there ever such a poem written as ‘Romeo and Juliet’?  Was there ever such music as Gounod’s?  I thought the first time that I went to the opera that it would spoil Shakspere—­how could it do otherwise?  I asked.  Could supreme perfection be improved upon?  Before the balcony scene had come to an end I found that I had never