"Miss Edgeworth, not too late am I?"
She looks up and sees Vivian Standish before her, as handsome a picture as ever riveted any one's gaze. She smiles a bewitching smile of assumed despair.
"What am I to do," she asks in perplexity, "I have only one dance to divide between two of you," and she turns to another importunate claimant, a diminutive man, very well inclined to embonpoint who wears red whiskers and spectacles, "I think you were first Mr Vernon" she says, smiling graciously, as she confronts his homely face.
Vivian's face was clouding perceptibly when some one laid his hand on Vernon's arm, and drew him aside, apparently not noticing that he was engaged, Vivian had a friend around that time.
"Mr. Vernon does not evidently appreciate my partiality for him," Honor says laughingly, looking straight into Vivian's eyes.
"And yet you would throw away on him, the favors I crave to obtain."
He said this half reproachfully, half eagerly. She placed her dainty little programme in his hand, and smiled when he returned it, to find he had written, "Lucky Vivian S." opposite the promised waltz.
I wonder if any realization in life thrusts itself so forcibly upon us, as that of the flight of time. Our dearest and most precious moments do not dare to linger with us an added instant, but hasten on with ceaseless flow to lose themselves in eternity's gulf. Only the hours of sorrow seem to halt in their flight. The clock never ticks so slow and measured a stroke as during the night of waiting, or watching. Then the rules of time become reversed, and in a lonely vigil one counts by heart-throbs, sixty hours in every slow, slow minute. The very moments, laden with gaiety and pleasure, that are dropping so quickly into the lap of the forever from out the Bellemare's lighted halls, are surely dragging painfully and slowly, for the weary watcher of death-beds, for the poor and shivering, for the deserted wife, for the orphan child, for the chained prisoner. This is the mystery of life, this is the many-sided picture of existence, and yet, this strange world is a masterpiece of a just and merciful Creator.
CHAPTER XX.
If all the year were playing holiday,
To sport would he as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come they wish'd-for come.
—Shakespeare