The world had been informed that it would find Mrs. Livingstone “at home
on Thursdays,” and on the first recurrence of that day, after the fancy party, we
shall see collected in her drawing-room nearly all the persons to whom this history
has introduced us.

Mr. Vaughn had looked in, and without in the least meaning to do so,
dwarfed the younger men by the polished ease of his manner, his dignity, and
the knowledge of the world for which he was remarkable.

Fergus, seated near the elegant Miss Winchendon, was evoking that young
lady's most gracious smiles, and rewarding them with a satirical dissection of
their absent friends, mingled with covert compliments to herself.

Francia, who had not seen her cousin since the ball, watched this by-play
from the corner of her eye, and grew more and more incoherent in her answers
to the fashionable gossip with which Mrs. Minturn kindly tried to entertain her.
But as that lady rose to go, the drawing-room door was thrown open to admit

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Dr. Luttrell and Mr. Chilton; and as Francia noted the sudden frown clouding
her cousin's face, a wicked impulse to brave the anger she despaired of softening,
seized upon her, and she returned Mr. Chilton's bow with a smile that at
once brought that young gentleman to her side.

Dr. Luttrell paused beside his hostess, who was, for the moment, disengaged.

“Where is Mrs. Luttrell?” asked Claudia.

“Where I am not,” returned the husband, concisely.

“And always?”

“When it can be so arranged.”

“Your honeymoon closed yesterday,” said Claudia, with a bitter-sweet
smile.

“A thing without beginning is also without end,” retorted her guest, coldly.

“As, for example, the love a man professes to the woman he wishes to
marry,” suggested Mrs. Livingstone.

“I have, in my life, professed love to only one woman, and she—made a
worthier choice,” said Luttrell, suffering his eyes to rest, with quiet scorn, upon
the stout figure of Mr. Livingstone, who stood, with his hands beneath his coattails,
upon the hearth-rug, discussing politics with Mr. Murray.

Claudia winced a little, but recovered herself cleverly. “Ah!” said she,
nonchalantly. “Who would suspect you of a petite histoire? You shall tell it
to me some day. Just now I must go and talk to Mrs. Burton; and you, let me
see?—you may bring Neria and the musician together, and get them into a
conversation about art. They are counterparts and ought to find it out.”

She glided away as she spoke, and seated herself to listen, with smiling interest,
to Mrs. Burton's narrative of her struggles with her last cook, until she
could adroitly contrive to entrap another matron into the conversation and
herself withdraw imperceptibly to more congenial companionship.

Dr. Luttrell watched her, with a singular expression in his tawny eyes, not
unlike a tiger, who, from the jungle, watches a stately doe surrounded by her
courtiers, and says in his heart,

Theirs to-day, mine to-morrow, if I will.

Then he turned to look for Neria and the musician, who sat a little way
from each other; she listening with grave attention to the chat between Fergus
and the brilliant belle, he apparently absorbed in reverie.

Dr. Luttrell placed himself between them and began to talk opera.