His face grew stern. "Did she tell you that?"
"Yes. But why did you go there, instead of coming to dance with me? Do you like those danseuses better than you do me? What was Céline's or anybody's début, to you?"
Ernest smiled at the native indignation of the question. "Never think that I do not wish to be with you; but--I wanted oblivion, and one cannot shake off old habits. Did you miss me among all those other men that you have always round you?"
"How unkind that is!" whispered Nina, indignantly. "You know I always do."
He held her closer to him in the waltz, and she felt his heart beat quicker, but she got no other answer.
That night Nina stood before her toilette-table, putting her flowers in water, and some hot tears fell on the azalias.
"I will have faith in him," she cried, passionately; "though all the world be witness against him, I will believe in him. Whatever his life may have been, his heart is warm and true; they shall never make me doubt it."
Her last thoughts were of him, and when she slept his face was in her dreams, while Ernest, with some of the wildest men of his set, smoked hard and drank deep in his chambers to drive away, if he could, the fiends of Regret and Passion and the memory of a young, radiant, impassioned face, which lured him to an unattainable future.
"Nina dearest," said Selina Ruskinstone, affectionately, the morning after, "I hope you will not think me unkind--you know I have no wish but for your good--but _don't_ you think it would be better to be a little more--more reserved, a little less free, with Mr. Vaughan?"
"Explain yourself more clearly," said Nina, tranquilly. "Do you wish me to send to Turkey for a veil and a guard of Bashi-Bazouks, or do you mean that Mr. Vaughan is so attractive that he is better avoided, like a mantrap or a Maëlstrom?"
"Don't be ridiculous," retorted Augusta; "you know well enough what we mean, and certainly you do run after him a great deal too much."
"You are so _very_ demonstrative," sighed Selina, "and it is so easily misconstrued. It is not feminine to court any man so unblushingly."
Nina's eyes flashed, and the blood colored her brow. "I am not afraid of being misconstrued by Mr. Vaughan," she said, haughtily; "gentlemen are kinder and wiser judges in those things than our sex."