'Oh no! I dare say he was dreadfully bored,' said Esther, smiling. 'And, then, was there not a wonderful Tasmanian fern that partly screened you from the partners you cheated?'

'Yes; a tall, graceful creature, with hundreds of yellowish-green and dusky-brown fronds drooping one over the other, and baby ones curled up tight, fold within fold, looking as though they had taken a vow never to emerge from their infant dreams of the woodland dell where they first saw the light.'

'I should very much like to know what you two others talked of, but perhaps it was too much à coeur ouvert et à langue délice to be confided to a mere elder sister?'

'Oh, nonsense! But what remains of the talk that has delighted us most? One may as well try to recall a walk on the seashore on a summer night. There was the moonlight and the "sparkle of the glancing stars," and there were the waves breaking on the beach, and others coming after them endlessly; but how much can we convey of the scene to another?'

'A good deal,' smiled Esther. 'Do I not remember how your first exercises in composition were writing conversations down verbatim? The pieces of moonlight globed in crystal, as I have heard Allie call the electric light in the alcoves, the flowers, and the crush of people, and the wonderful Austrian band—all that would make talk after a first dance, but not for so very long.'

'Well, after our quadrille my partner said he was only in Adelaide two days. He had just landed, and was on his way to some of the other colonies, though he had fallen into such a piece of luck. I thought it was a very fleeting form of fortune, and said:

'Das Glück ist eine leichte Dirne

Und bleibt nicht lang am selber Ort.'

A pleased look came into his face. His mother was a German, though brought up in England, and the language was his second mother-tongue. I read Heine, then? Oh yes; and nearly all the German writers; and I had translated Goethe. His face fell comically. I know he was astounded at such conceit, and—you know what a delightful sensation it is to see a little downright fun looming on the horizon—so I said with unmoved seriousness, "I know Kant, too, very well; and it is a great consolation, for when the hairdresser comes to dress my hair for a ball I pass the time by remembering bits out of the 'Kritik of Pure Reason.'"'

'Oh, Stella! what put such a comical thought into your head? Of course, he found you out then?'

'Yes; and we both laughed heartily; and that, you know, is like eating salt together—it is a sort of mental latchkey. When Tom came to claim his dance after my partner and I had sat out a waltz we were both in Rome. I told Tom I would let him off his duty dance, and so we still talked on. An unfortunate man slipped and fell with his partner in front of our alcove. "Surely that is one of the thirty-six tragic situations of life," said my partner. I said there must be a great many more then thirty-six, and we began to count; but we fell out at once. He declared existence would be honeycombed with tragedy if my contentions as to tragic situations were allowed. We grew serious and laughed the next moment, and flouted each other's arguments. "But I will tell you one of the thirty-six," he said: "to dance and talk, and then to part." I was just on the point of saying, "Especially if you do not know your partner's name," when, to my horror, there was Mr. Andrew Harrison, and the polka-mazurka, for which he was down on my programme, almost over.'