Nell of Shorne Mills

Lady Luce came forward to him with both hands extended; and the "Drake,

thank God!" was perhaps as genuinely a devout an expression as she had

ever uttered. For it seemed to her that Providence had especially

intervened in her behalf and sent him to her side. We all of us have an

idea that Providence is more interested in us than in other persons.

Drake stood and looked at her for an instant with the same surprise

which had assailed him when he recognized her; then he took the small,

exquisitely gloved hands. How could he refuse them? As he had said, the

members of their set could not be strangers, though two of them had been

lovers and one had been jilted. They had to meet as friends or

acquaintances, as individuals of a community, which, living for

pleasure, could not be bored by quarrels and estrangements.

In the "smart" set a man lives not for himself alone, but for the other

men with whom he plays and shoots and jokes and drinks; for the women

with whom he drives and rides and dances. He must sink personal feeling,

likes and dislikes, or the social ship which he joins as one of the

crew, the ship which can sail only on smooth and sunlit waves, will

founder. So Drake took her hands and smiled a greeting at her.

"Why! To find you here! What are you doing here, Drake?" she said.

She had no right to call him "Drake"; she had lost that right the day

she had jilted him; but she called him "Drake," and the name left her

lips softly and meltingly.

"I might ask the same of you, Luce," he replied gravely, and unconscious

in the stress of the moment that he, too, had used the Christian name.

But, alas! Nell had heard it! She had, half mechanically, shrunk behind

the pedestal; she shrank still farther behind it as Drake spoke, and she

put up her hand on the cold marble as if for support. For she was

trembling in every limb, and a sensation as of approaching death was

creeping over her. The terrace and the two figures grew misty and

indistinct, the music of the band sounded like a blurred discord in her

ears, and the blood rushed through her veins like fire one moment and

like ice the next.

She would have rushed out of her hiding place and into the house, but

she could not move. Was she going to die? or was this awful, sickening

weakness only a warning that she was going to faint? She pressed her

forehead against the marble, and the icy coldness of the unsympathetic

stone revived her. She found that she could hear every word, though the

two had moved to the stone rail.