She sighed presently, and laid her hand heavily on the chair behind
which she was standing. The action aroused the man who sat in it, and
he turned and looked at her for the first time.

"You are tired, Diana?"

"Yes, papa, I am very tired."

"Give me your card, then, and go away," the gamester answered
peevishly; "girls are always tired."

She gave him the mysteriously-perforated card, and left her post behind
his chair; and then, after roaming about the great saloon with a weary
listless air, and wandering from one open window to another to look
into the sunny quadrangle, where well-dressed people were sitting at
little tables eating ices or drinking lemonade, she went away
altogether, and roamed into another chamber where some children were
dancing to the sound of a feeble violin. She sat upon a velvet-covered
bench, and watched the children's lesson for some minutes, and then
rose and wandered to another open window that overlooked the same
quadrangle, where the well-dressed people were enjoying themselves in
the hot August sunshine.

"How extravagantly everybody dresses!" she thought, "and what a shabby
poverty-stricken creature one feels amongst them! And yet if I ask papa
to give me a couple of napoleons out of the money he won to-day, he
will only look at me from head to foot, and tell me I have a gown and a
cloak and a bonnet, and ask me what more I can want, in the name of all
that is unreasonable? And I see girls here whose fathers are so fond of
them and so proud of them--ugly girls, decked out in silks and muslins