wraps and appeared in her dainty white toilette, Olivia blushed with gratified vanity. Her dress was the perfection of simplicity, soft and diaphanous, and around her milk white arms and throat were her mother's pearls.
As the three ladies came out into the brilliant corridor to meet their escorts, Pembroke received a kind of thrill at Olivia's beauty—a beauty which had never struck him very forcibly before. She was undoubtedly pretty and graceful, and he had often admired her slight and willowy figure—but she had grown beautiful in her solitary country life—beautiful with patience, courage and womanliness. The Colonel, in a superb swallow-tail of the style of ten years past, his coat-tails lined with white satin, his snowy ruffle falling over the bosom of his waist-*coat, his fine curling white hair combed carefully down upon his velvet collar in the old fashion, offered his arm like a prince to Mrs. De Peyster, herself a stately and imposing matron, and proud to be escorted by such a chevalier. Pembroke walked beside Olivia and Helena down the broad staircase.
Is there any form of social life more imposing than a really splendid ball? The tall and nodding ferns and palms, the penetrating odor of flowers, the clash of music, the brilliant crowd moving to and fro through the great drawing rooms and halls, brought a deeper flush to Olivia's cheek. She felt like a débutante.
They made their way slowly toward the upper end of the last of a noble suite of rooms. Pem-
