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gender, as her bright eyes roved incessantly over the ball-room, taking note of every incident and almost every smile or frown, all the time that her flying feet and airy conversation enchanted her partners; and it was Carrie’s capable little hand which finally put a match to the mine, and destroyed a fortress that all the heavy arguments of the Granby family, the laboured warnings of Mr. Austin, and the murmured commentaries of all the world around, had not sufficed even to shake for an instant previously.

But the moment of action was not yet arrived, in Carrie’s opinion, and she was carried onward by the stream of her social duties in the direction of the supper-room, towards whose closed doors her devoted chief justice had been casting anxious glances for more than an hour previously.

As soon, however, as she could get away from the supper-room Carrie slipped her arm into Mrs. Austin’s, and, with the authority of an old school friend, and of a girl who might be married at any moment, suggested that they should go upstairs to the little half-enclosed gallery, which hung over the hall at that corner, in the style of a “Queen’s closet” of old Spanish palaces. Carrie well knew what she was about when she fought a pitched battle (and won it)