She disappeared temporarily from the flagging party of dancers, and then came downstairs wrapped up and looking altogether a different person from whom she had been hitherto, in fact (to Dick's sadness and disappointment), a woman somewhat reserved and of a phlegmatic temperament--nothing left in her of the romping girl that she had seemed but a short quarter-hour before, who had not minded the weight of Dick's hand upon her waist, nor shirked the purlieus of the mistletoe.
"What a difference!" thought the young man--hoary cynic pro tem.

"What a miserable deceiving difference between the manners of a maid's life at dancing times and at others! Look at this lovely Fancy! Through the whole past evening touchable, squeezeable--even kissable! For whole half- hours I held her so chose to me that not a sheet of paper could have been shipped between us; and I could feel her heart only just outside my own, her life beating on so close to mine, that I was aware of every breath in it.

A flit is made upstairs--a hat and a cloak put on--and I no more dare to touch her than--" Thought failed him, and he returned to realities.
But this was an endurable misery in comparison with what followed.

Mr.
Shiner and his watch-chain, taking the intrusive advantage that ardent bachelors who are going homeward along the same road as a pretty young woman always do take of that circumstance, came forward to assure Fancy--with a total disregard of Dick's emotions, and in tones which were certainly not frigid--that he (Shiner) was not the man to go to bed before seeing his Lady Fair safe within her own door--not he, nobody should say he was that;--and that he would not leave her side an inch till the thing was done--drown him if he would.

The proposal was assented to by Miss Day, in Dick's foreboding judgment, with one degree--or at any rate, an appreciable fraction of a degree--of warmth beyond that required by a disinterested desire for protection from the dangers of the night.
All was over; and Dick surveyed the chair she had last occupied, looking now like a setting from which the gem has been torn.