Mabel had not the air of one whose heart is bruised or torn. That

she had gained in queenliness within the past year was not evidence

of austerity or the callousness that ensues upon the healing of a

wound. The Ayletts were a stately race, and the few who, while she

was in her teens, had carped at her lack of pride because of her

disposition to choose friends from the walks of life lower than her

own, and criticised as unbecoming the playful familiarity that

caused underlings and plebeians--the publicans and sinners of the

aristocrat's creed--to worship the ground on which she trod--the

censors in the court of etiquette conferred upon her altered

demeanor the patent of their approbation, averring, for the

thousandth time, that good blood would assert itself in the long run

and bring forth the respectable fruits of refinement, self-

appreciation, and condescension. The change had come over her by

perceptible, but not violent, stages of progression, dating--Mrs.

Sutton saw with pain; Rosa, with enforced respect--from the sunset

hour in which she had read her brother's sentence of condemnation

upon her then betrothed, now estranged, lover. After that one

evening, she had not striven to conceal herself and her hurt in

solitude. Neither had she borrowed from desperation a brazen helmet

to hide the forehead the cruel letter had, for a brief space, laid

low in the dust of anguished humiliation.

If a whisper of her disappointment and the attendant incidents crept

through the ranks of her associates, it died away for want of

confirmation in her clear level-lidded eyes, elastic footfall and

the willingness and frequency with which she appeared and played her

part in the various scenes of gayety that made the winter succeeding

her brother's marriage one long to be remembered by the

pleasure-seekers of the vicinity. She had not disdained the

assistance of her sister-in-law's judgment and experience in the

choice of the dresses that were to grace these merry-makings, and,

thanks to her own naturally excellent taste, now tacitly disputed

the palm of elegant attire with that lady. Her Christmas costume,

which, in many others of her age, would have been objected to by

critical fashionists, as old-maidish and grave, yet set off her pale

complexion--none of the Ayletts were rosy after they reached man's

or woman's estate--and heightened her distingue bearing into regal

grace. Yet it was only a heavy black silk, rich and glossy as satin,

cut, as was then the universal rule of evening dress, tolerably low

in the neck, with short sleeves; bunches of pomegranate-blossoms

and buds for breast and shoulder-knots, and among the classic braids

of her dark hair a half-wreath of the same.




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