"Pretty!" Sir Everard exclaimed; "she is beautiful as an angel! I
never saw such eyes or such a smile in the whole course of my life."

"Indeed!" his mother said, coldly--"indeed! Not even excepting Lady
Louise's?"

"Oh, Lady Louise is altogether different! I didn't mean any
comparison. But you will see her to-night at Lady Carteret's ball, and
can judge for yourself. She is a mere child--sixteen or seventeen, I
believe."

"And Lady Louise is five-and-twenty," said Mildred, with awful accuracy.

"She does not look twenty!" exclaimed my lady, sharply. "There are few
young ladies nowadays half so elegant and graceful as Lady Louise."

Miss Silver's large black eyes glided from one to the other with a
sinister smile in their shining depths. Her soft voice broke in at
this jarring juncture and sweetly turned the disturbed current of
conversation, and Sir Everard understood, and gave her a grateful
glance.

The young baronet had gone to many balls in his lifetime, but never had
he been so painfully particular before. He drove Edward, his valet, to
the verge of madness with his whims, and left off at last in sheer
desperation and altogether dissatisfied with the result.

"I look like a guy, I know," he muttered, angrily, "and that pert
little Hunsden is just the sort of girl to make satirical comments on a
man if his neck-tie is awry or his hair unbecoming. Not that I care