Isabel meekly dried her eyes, sighing deeply as she did so.  “I can have the pieces joined, I dare say; but it will never be the same cross to me again.”

“What have you done with the pieces?” irascibly asked Mrs. Vane.

“I folded them in the thin paper Mrs. Levison gave me, and put it inside my frock.  Here it is,” touching the body.  “I have no pocket on.”

Mrs. Vane gave vent to a groan.  She never had been a girl herself—­she had been a woman at ten; and she complimented Isabel upon being little better than an imbecile.  “Put it inside my frock!” she uttered in a torrent of scorn.  “And you eighteen years of age!  I fancied you left off ‘frocks’ when you left the nursery.  For shame, Isabel!”

“I meant to say my dress,” corrected Isabel.

“Meant to say you are a baby idiot!” was the inward comment of Mrs. Vane.

A few minutes and Isabel forgot her grievance.  The brilliant rooms were to her as an enchanting scene of dreamland, for her heart was in its springtide of early freshness, and the satiety of experience had not come.  How could she remember trouble, even the broken cross, as she bent to the homage offered her and drank in the honeyed words poured forth into her ear?

“Halloo!” cried an Oxford student, with a long rent-roll in prospective, who was screwing himself against the wall, not to be in the way of the waltzers, “I thought you had given up coming to these places?”

“So I had,” replied the fast nobleman addressed, the son of a marquis.  “But I am on the lookout, so am forced into them again.  I think a ball-room the greatest bore in life.”

“On the lookout for what?”

“For a wife.  My governor has stopped supplies, and has vowed by his beard not to advance another shilling, or pay a debt, till I reform.  As a preliminary step toward it, he insists upon a wife, and I am trying to choose one for I am deeper in debt than you imagine.”

“Take the new beauty, then.”

“Who is she?”

“Lady Isabel Vane.”

“Much obliged for the suggestion,” replied the earl.  “But one likes a respectable father-in-law, and Mount Severn is going to smash.  He and I are too much in the same line, and might clash, in the long run.”

“One can’t have everything; the girl’s beauty is beyond common.  I saw that rake, Levison, make up to her.  He fancies he can carry all before him, where women are concerned.”

“So he does, often,” was his quiet reply.

“I hate the fellow!  He thinks so much of himself, with his curled hair and shining teeth, and his white skin; and he’s as heartless as an owl.  What was that hushed-up business about Miss Charteris?”

“Who’s to know?  Levison slipped out of the escapade like an eel, and the woman protested that he was more sinned against than sinning.  Three-fourths of the world believed them.”

“And she went abroad and died; and Levison here he comes!  And Mount Severn’s daughter with him.”