I may be pardoned this little digression, as it serves to explain in some measure how I felt on entering the splendidly lit up salons of the villa, crowded with hundreds of figures in all the varied costumes of a carnival,—the sounds of laughter mingled with the crash of the music; the hurrying hither and thither of servants with refreshments; the crowds gathered around fortune-tellers, whose predictions threw the parties at each moment into shouts of merriment; the eager following of some disappointed domino, interrogating every one to find out a lost mask. For some time I stood an astonished spectator at the kind of secret intelligence which seemed to pervade the whole assemblage, when suddenly a mask, who for some time had been standing beside me, whispered in French,—
“If you pass your time in this manner, you must not feel surprised if your place be occupied.”
I turned hastily round, but she was gone. She, I say, for the voice was clearly a woman’s; her pink domino could be no guide, for hundreds of the same color passed me every instant. The meaning of the allusion I had little doubt of. I turned to speak to Power, but he was gone; and for the first moment of my life, the bitterness of rivalry crossed my mind. It was true I had resigned all pretensions in his favor. My last meeting with Lucy had been merely to justify my own character against an impression that weighed heavily on me; still, I thought he might have waited,—another day and I should be far away, neither to witness nor grieve over his successes.
“You still hesitate,” whispered some one near me.
I wheeled round suddenly, but could not detect the speaker, and was again relapsing into my own musings, when the same voice repeated,—
“The white domino with the blue cape. Adieu.”
Without waiting to reflect upon the singularity of the occurrence, I now hurried along through the dense crowd, searching on every side for the domino.
“Isn’t that O’Malley?” said an Englishman to his friend.
“Yes,” replied the other; “the very man we want. O’Malley, find a partner; we have been searching a vis-à-vis this ten minutes.”
The speaker was an officer I had met at Sir George Dashwood’s. “How did you discover me?” said I, suddenly.