"I will do as you wish, sir," she answers, in so low a voice that he does not catch its faint inflection of scorn.
Other promenaders come out on the piazza, and one or two laughing jests are thrown at him for keeping the "belle of the ball away from her proper sphere."
"Perhaps I am selfish," he says. "Let us return to the ball-room, my love."
"As you please," she answers.
He leads her back and lingers by her side awhile, then it strikes him that les proprietes do not sanction a man's monopolizing his wife's company in society. With a sigh he leaves her, and tries to make himself agreeable to other fair women.
He has hardly left her before the band strikes up "The Beautiful Blue Danube," and Byron Penn starts up from some remote corner, from which he has witnessed her return to the ball-room.
"This is our waltz, is it not?" he says, with a tremor of pleasure in his voice.
A slight flush rises over Bonnibel's cheek.
"I believe it is," she answers; "but if you will not think me very rude, Mr. Penn, I am going to ask you to excuse me from it. I am tired and shall dance no more this evening."
"You are very cruel," says the poet, plaintively; "but if you wish to atone for your injustice you will walk down to the shore with me and look at the moonlight on the sea, and hear how delicious the music sounds down there. You can form no conception of its sweetness when mellowed by a little distance and blent with the solemn diapason of the waves."