lands of red geraniums and euphorbia and vivid pomegranate, deepening into the darker tones of the red camellias and azaleas and the great flags of poinsettia. Minnie Pryde bewailed her pink dress, which was quite out of harmony with the prevailing colouring.
"Oh, Elsie, how clever of you to find out what they were going to decorate with!" she cried, looking admiringly at Elsie's cloudy white gauze with its splashes of crimson at waist and bosom. Elsie's cheeks were almost as bright as the crimson flowers, but the colour came and went, and there was a frightened look in her eyes.
Frank Hallett, who was one of the stewards, was waiting near the doorway.
"Your sister asked me to tell you not to wait in the cloak room," he said. "She may be late. We've been dining at Government House, you know, and Mr. Blake and I managed to get away before the rest, because of being stewards. Mrs. Jem will chaperon you till Ina comes."
Mrs. Jem was gorgeous in maize and black lace, which suited her brunette colouring and her affectation of matron-hood. She had taken her place among the higher magnates, and did not smile quite as sweet a welcome to poor pariah Elsie as Frank Hallett would have wished. But Mrs. Jem was wise in her generation, and she had a shrewd notion that Lord Waveryng would take to Elsie, and it was quite evident that Elsie's position in Leichardt's Town society would be somewhat changed by the Waveryngs' stay at Government House, and the admission of Lady Horace into that inner circle from which she had been in her girlhood so rigorously excluded.
"Yes, lovely," said Mrs. Jem, in answer to a remark of Lady Garfit's. "But you know I always said that Ina was so much better style, and the rouge is quite evident to-night. It is such a pity."
But even as she spoke Elsie's cheeks belied the accusation. The girl went deadly white for an instant, and then the crimson tide welled up again. Blake was coming to-
