me a compliment; I dislike being second choice, and I simply cannot compete with the music halls."
He cast a distressed look at the crowd below.
"Please don't talk that way—this isn't the same thing; every man does that at one time or another."
Camilla found herself bowing to somebody, somewhere, and smiling with conventional precision.
"Now tell me the truth, Ferdie, why did you select the end of the first act of 'Romeo and Juliet' to say this—and right down my back, at that? Who told you to do it?"
With the simple innocence of a child he pouted and observed:
"You might at least give me credit for originality."
"Not consistently, young man; the book wouldn't balance. Confess, now, you were put up to this—perhaps a wager, as in the chanson case, or a desire to break into theatricals?"
His appearance of grief deepened.
"You bombard me with questions," he complained, "and talk as if I had been rehearsing it all and you wanted to know the name of the stage manager. When I asked Stockton how to go about it I told him you'd be flippant and not—" he paused, finishing wildly. "There, you led me into a trap!"
Camilla laughed again.
"So it was Stockton? He ought to have known better—with his experience."
"You were to be in a sympathetic mood, because of the opera, the music, the lights and the flowers—and all that, you know. He read about it in a book, and when the heroine was told that—well, what I told you—she let her beautiful head droop and a rose color crimsoned her fair white cheeks, while she softly said— Oh, I know it's a jolly bit of rot, Camilla, and I guess I've gone about it wrong; but, honestly, I care a lot for you, and it would please Pa. He thinks you've got such sense; couldn't you care for me a little?"
Camilla was again nodding to somebody.
"I do care for you, Ferdie; you are a good little boy, and some day some sweet, cute person, with none too much sense and no ambition, will make you a good wife. But you've made a mistake; don't let it happen again."
His expostulation was cut short by the appearance of another—a man who had been talking with Mrs. Trenton, and who now came into the foreground with a murmured apology and lightly took Camilla's outstretched hand.
"No intrusion, Mr. Illington," said Camilla, cheerfully. "Ferdie has just been wanting to marry me; it's his peculiar divertissement on opera nights, especially at 'Romeo and Juliet.' Why, in three seasons he has probably proposed to every available girl in the Horseshoe."
Young Mr. Acton rose to go, evincing, by furious blushes, his embarrassment that Camilla should so lightly regard and make public his advances. He made hurriedly for Mrs. Trenton, giving Illington a curt nod. Five minutes later Camilla saw him attentive to a young woman in a pale blue dress, and smiled across the forest of heads encouragingly, again to his discomfiture. Illington, who had taken the vacant seat, offered some commonplace on the singers of the night.
"I always preferred Eames in this," he confessed, frankly. "She is singing rather better this evening, too, than when I last heard her in Chicago."
"Chicago? Isn't that where they license opera as they do the circus. and the Wild West—or is it Kansas City? I understood Chicago wasn't what is called 'musical.'"
"But it is—intensely. We have symphony cake-walk concerts in a vaudeville theatre twice daily, and once I heard a beautiful woman play the 'Intermezzo' on sleigh-bells."
"How extraordinary!"
"Yes; when you consider that she was poised on a slack wire at the time, and never once lost her balance."
