The night is cloudless, balmy, beautiful—such nights as we have in the last of July when the moon is full and Heaven martials its hosts of stars in the illimitable canopy above. The spacious ball-room is thronged with revelers. The dreamy, passionate strains of waltz-music float out upon the air, filling it with melody.
Standing beside a window is Colonel Carlyle, in elegant evening dress, looking very stately and distinguished despite his seventy years. Leaning on his arm is Felise Herbert, looking radiant in rose-colored satin and gauze, with a diamond fillet clasping her dark hair, and diamonds shining like dew on her bare throat and rounded arms. Smiles dimple her red lips as she watches the animated scene about her, and her dark eyes shine like stars. Her companion thinks that he never saw her half so handsome before as she hangs on his arm and chatters airy nothings in his ears.
"Look at our little Bonnibel," she says, in a tone of innocent amusement; "is she not a demure little coquette? She looks like a veritable snow-maiden, as cold and as pure, yet she has young Penn inextricably prisoned in her toils, and everyone knows it—no one better than herself."
His glance follows hers across the room to where his young wife stands a little outside the giddy circle of waltzers, leaning on the arm of a handsome, dreamy-looking youth, and despite the jealous pang that thrills him at Felise's artful speech, his heart throbs with a great love and pride at her exceeding beauty.
She looks like a snow-maiden, indeed, as her enemy says. She wears costly white lace over her white silk, and her cheeks and brow, her arms and shoulders are white as her dress. Colonel Carlyle's wedding gift, a magnificent set of diamonds, adorns her royally. There is not a flower about her, nothing but silk and laces and costly gems, yet withal, she makes you think of a lily, she looks so white, and cold, and pure in the whirl of rainbow hues around her.
Her companion bends toward her, speaking earnestly, yet she listens with such apparent indifference and almost ennui that if that be coquetry at all it can surely be characterized by no other term than that of Felise—"demure."
"I thought that Penn's loves were all ideal ones," the colonel says, trying to speak carelessly as he watches his wife's companion closely. "To judge from his latest volumes of poems, the divinities of his worship are all too ethereal to tread this lower earth."
Felise laughs significantly as her companion ceases to speak.
"Byron Penn, despite the ethereal creatures of his brain, is not proof against mortal beauty," she says. "Remember, Colonel Carlyle, that angels once looked down from Heaven and loved the women of earth."
"He is a graceful waltzer," her companion returns, as the young poet circles the waist of the snow-maiden with one arm and whirls her into the mazes of the giddy, breathless waltz.