"Yes, a little, but I do not choose to speak it. If you have anything to say to me you can say it in English."
"I cannot understand English," replied the mask, still in German, and now Lily thought the voice seemed changed; but she clung to her belief that it was some hoax played at her expense, and she continued her efforts to make him answer her in English. The two turns round the room had stretched to half a dozen in this futile task, but she felt herself powerless to leave the mask, who for his part betrayed signs of embarrassment, as if he had undertaken a ruse of which he repented. A confused movement in the crowd and a sudden cessation of the music recalled her to herself, and she now took her partner's arm and hurried with him toward the place where she had left the princess. But the princess had already gone into the supper-room, and she had no other recourse than to follow with the stranger.
As they entered the supper-room she removed her little visor, and she felt, rather than saw, the mask put up his hand and lift away his own: he turned his head, and looked down upon her with the face of a man she had never seen before.
"Ah, you are there!" she heard the princess's voice calling to her from one of the tables. "How tired you look! Here—here! I will make you drink this glass of wine."
The officer who brought her the wine gave her his arm and led her to the princess, and the late mask mixed with the two-score other tall blond officers.
The night which stretched so far into the day ended at last, and she followed Hoskins down to their gondola. He entered the boat first, to give her his hand in stepping from the riva; at the same moment she involuntarily turned at the closing of the door behind her, and found at her side the tall blond mask, or one of the masks, if there were two who had danced with her. He caught her hand suddenly to his lips, and kissed it.
"Adieu—forgive!" he murmured in English, and then vanished indoors again.
"Owen," said Mrs. Elmore dramatically at the end of her narration, "who do you think it could have been?"
"I have no doubt as to who it was, Celia," replied Elmore, with a heat evidently quite unexpected to his wife, "and if Lily has not been seriously annoyed by the matter, I am glad that it has happened. I have had my regrets—my doubts—whether I did not dismiss that man's pretensions too curtly, too unkindly. But I am convinced now that we did exactly right, and that she was wise never to bestow another thought upon him. A man capable of contriving a petty persecution of this sort—of pursuing a young girl who had rejected him in this shameless fashion,—is no gentleman."
"It was a persecution," said Mrs. Elmore, with a dazed air, as if this view of the case had not occurred to her.