"Take me!" she echoed tremulously. "What an idea! I'm too old to go to mask balls."
"You don't look it," suggested Hoskins.
"Oh, I couldn't go," she sighed. "But it's very, very kind."
Hoskins dropped his head, and gave the low chuckle with which he confessed any little bit of humbug. "Well, you or Miss Lily."
Lily had retired to the other side of the room as soon as the parley about the invitation began. Without asking or seeing, she knew what was in the note, and now she felt it right to make a feint of not knowing what Mrs. Elmore meant when she asked, "What do you say, Lily?"
When the question was duly explained to her, she answered languidly, "I don't know. Do you think I'd better?"
"I might as well make a clean breast of it, first as last," said Hoskins. "I thought perhaps Mrs. Elmore might refuse, she's so stiff about some things,"—here he gave that chuckle of his,—"and so I came prepared for contingencies. It occurred to me that it mightn't be quite the thing, and so I went round to the Spanish consul and asked him how he thought it would do for me to matronize a young lady if I could get one, and he said he didn't think it would do at all." Hoskins let this adverse decision sink into the breasts of his listeners before he added: "But he said that he was going with his wife, and that if we would come along she could matronize us both. I don't know how it would work," he concluded impartially.
They all looked at Elmore, who stood holding the princess's missive in his hand, and darkly forecasting the chances of consent and denial. At the first suggestion of the matter, a reckless hope that this ball might bring Ehrhardt above their horizon again sprang up in his heart, and became a desperate fear when the whole responsibility of action was, as usual, left with him. He stood, feeling that Hoskins had used him very ill.
"I suppose," began Mrs. Elmore very thoughtfully, "that this will be something quite in the style of the old masquerades under the Republic."
"Regular Ridotto business, the Spanish consul says," answered Hoskins.