The Argosy — page 190: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Lady’s Coin. ao disobey. She left the room. An instant later, she thought she heard a cry, and returned. But when she listened at the door, all was silence. IV. THE ball had begun. Gay figures in all imaginable eccentricities of attire, and all closely masked, filled the brilliantly-lghted saloons. Some danced ; some chatted in groups ; some roamed from room to room, in amused endeavour to solve the surrounding problems. It was difficult—in most cases impossible—to pronounce who was who. But two—a young man dressed like a crusader, and a girl like a Watteau shepherdess, had speedily discovered one another. They had danced together, and now they were sitting amid the orange-trees of a beautiful conservatory, talking in low tones. ‘Never mind, darling,” said the young man. “TI will live for you, I will work for you—I will think of you only—and when I have won my spurs, I will come back :—if only you care enough to wait ? ” “Oh, Godfrey, you know, you know! As if I could ever think of anyone else! Oh, to hear mother talk! But Godfrey, she doesn’t know what love is. She has never loved anyone herself, you see ;— perhaps I oughtn’t to say it, when there is my father—but—he was so much older than she was, and he cares only for politics—it never could have been like you and me! You don’t think me undutiful, Godfrey ? You understand ?” Understand ? of course he did !—and so they talked on and on, all the world to one another ; forgetting the time, forgetting everyone outside that conservatory. At last, however, Rose remembered the Marchioness, from whose wing she had escaped. ‘““T hope she won’t be angry with me for staying so long. She said I might be with you this one night. But perhaps we had better try to find her now.” They tried, but were unsuccessful ; so, nothing loth, returned to their hiding-place amid the orange-blossoms. Meanwhile a tall figure, in a long black cloak, was knocking at the workhouse door in Wall Street. A woman had called to make inquiries about the man who had died that afternoon, was the message shortly brought to the master. “She says, sir, she thinks she can identify him, and in that case his friends would not wish him to have a pauper funeral.” So the master allowed her—a respectable woman evidently ; handsome too, beneath her heavy black veil—to be conducted to the mortuary. ‘The nurse escorted her, holding a lantern, across a paved courtyard. ‘You’re not nervous, ma’am, at seeing a dead person ? ” ““T shall not be nervous if. . . . if he is the person I knew.” The nurse unlocked a strong door, they entered a stone-flagged GomiilGaooks im