outrolling of the flag of beneficent enterprises hand in hand, all was at
an end. These, then, are the deceptions our elders tell of! That
masculine voice should herald a new world to the maiden. The voice she
had heard did but rock to ruin the world she had been living in.

Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or on
his conduct. Nesta had nothing to defend: she walked in a bald waste.

'Can I have been guilty of leading him to think . . .?' she said, in a
tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.

'They choose to think,' mademoiselle replied. 'It is he or another. My
dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick, as
they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any
one's, if you are hit.'

Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of 'Louise.'

Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty. 'Has it happened
to me? I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at: yes,
my dear, I have gone through it. To spare you the questions tormenting
you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes
nigh on a kind of resemblance. The first gentleman who did me the honour
to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.'

Nesta cried 'Oh!' in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to
her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby's boom of the terrific word attacking
Louise from that deformed one.

Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision. A girl of