The Huntington Advertiser

BETRAYED

BY A MOLE

A Story of a Masquerade Ball and a Dinner Party.

Carroll Irere had gone to the French hall masque. It was all very wearisome to him. He had been to dozens of such balls before, and he wondered now what he had come for. It was not as it had been when he was a boy. It was nothing but a nuisance, and yet he stayed, wearied and disgusted, yawning until the tears came in his eyes, wishing himself elsewhere and lingering alone in dreary isolation.

There came of a sudden a sigh, a long quivering sigh, almost a sob. Carroll was startled, but he made no sign. There was someone in the box, after all. Without moving his head he flashed a glance through the grating out of the corners of his eyes. There was a woman sitting there, quite close to him. She must have moved from the back of the box since he had come, for he was certain that she was not there when he took his seat.

She evidently had not noticed him and believed herself unobserved. In his brief glance Carroll had seen that she wore a black domino and mask of the plainest kind; that her hands were clasped in her lap, and that she appeared to be looking at the dancers. They could not see her, he thought.

He stole another look at her, and as he did so she sighed again, a sigh of woefulness and pain. Then she moved and, taking up a fan in her lap, began to noiselessly fan herself. The flap of her mask moved in the faint winnowing air made by the fan, rose a little, then fell. Suddenly, at a wider sweep of the fan, the flap curved upward in a deep wave, and Carroll saw a portion of a smooth, pale cheek, the corner of her mouth, and near it, toward the chin, a small brown mole.

Almost simultaneously she raised her eyes and saw him looking at her through the grating. She dropped the fan and made a grasp at the edge of the mask. Through the two slits for the eyes Carroll saw hers, and, though he could not tell whether they were light or dark, he saw that they were full of terror. The thought flashed through his mind, "I will know her again," and he knew that she had thought the same of him. The next instant she had withdrawn into the back of the box. Carroll went home wondering about her.

A few evenings later he went to a dinner at the house of a fashionable lady who was a relation of his. Just before dinner she came to him and said:

"Carroll, I have a favor to ask of you. My niece, Helen, a little country lass, is in town for the winter, to stay with her brother, who is going to college. She is under my wing and is very young and bashful. I am going to ask you to take her in to dinner and be kind to her. She has seen so little of society. She was here a moment ago, but has run away again for some reason or other. I will introduce you to her when she comes back."

Carroll assured her that he would be delighted, which had more truth in it than such remarks usually have. It would be less trouble to talk to a young miss like this than to a more tried veteran, and if she couldn't talk he could eat his dinner in peace and let her preserve the silence so dear to the debutante.

Presently, in the movement and well bred shuffling of a dinner cortege getting under way, a young girl was given him to take as his partner and with whom he brought up the rear of the long procession. He hardly noticed her. Bread and butter was not in his line. He felt her small hand put limply on his arm, and he was dimly aware that her dress was pink. She said nothing in answer to his remark about the oak panels in the hall; she assented faintly.

She was evidently extremely shy. Seated at table, Carroll, unfolding his napkin, said he liked pink candle shades and then began to take his soup. When he had finished it, he looked about the table, smiled at a lady opposite, said something to a man farther down. Finally, absently brushing his long mustache with his napkin, he looked at his companion. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, her head drooped, her eyes staring at the centerpiece. Her cheeks and chin were smooth and pale, and near the corner of her mouth toward the chin was a square piece of black court plaster.

Still smoothing back his mustache with the napkin, Carroll looked at the small black square. He would have given a year's income if it would have fallen off. He looked at the shape and set of her head, at the pose of her folded hands. It was the same, yet how could it be? He looked at her cheek and chin and then, lowering his eyes, tried to recall the exact appearance of the cheek and chin he had seen under the mask's undulating flap. Then he glanced up. It was the same; there could be no doubt. And still it seemed incredible. She was not more than eighteen years old, and she looked so pensive and wistful. She seemed to have forgotten his presence and to be absorbed in her own melancholy ponderings, staring at the centerpiece.

'I am afraid,' he said, 'that you have only just come to town.'

She started and looked up at him. He even seemed to recognize the eyes with their look of scared surprise. For a moment she seemed confused, then she said:

"Yes, but I am going to stay for the winter. My brother is here at college. I have come to look after him. We are orphans."

Having given her explanation she looked away and seemed to be about to once more relapse into silence.

"You will be able to have a gay winter," he said, determined to make her talk. "You are fond of society, I suppose?"

She was silent for a brief space and then answered as if reluctantly:

"No; I don't care for going out."

"I thought all young girls loved dancing, parties, balls," he continued, intently watching her.

"Others may; I don't."

"You like the country life best?"

She turned her eyes on him and said with a deep sigh:

"Oh, yes!"

If there was anything needed to confirm him in his belief that this young girl was one and the same as the woman he had seen at the ball the sigh was all that was necessary. As it fell upon his ear, plaintively soft and melancholy, he seemed once more to be looking through the gilded grating at the masked figure and the fluttering fan.

Full of conflicting doubts, he leaned back in his chair to think, at the same moment the lady on his other side turned toward him with some laughing remark which required a quick answer. Then came challenge and retort from farther up the table, and for some moments the conversation ran on brilliantly. Dinner was nearly at a close when his opportunity came. Every one about them was talking or laughing. The girl beside him alone was silent, sunk in her brooding thoughts. Without a word of warning he suddenly leaned toward her and said, almost in a whisper:

"What were you doing at the masked ball on Thursday evening?"

She turned pale, but sat silent without moving. He was silent, too, waiting for an answer. After a few seconds she said:

"I had to go."

"You had to go?" he repeated in surprise.

"Yes. I didn't know what else to do. I found out that Charlie—that's my brother—had gone. It was too late to find him, and anyway he would have only got angry with me. He says I am always interfering. But it isn't that. There are only us two, and we have to take care of each other. I must take care of him and he of me. I knew it was a wrong place for him to go, but he was already gone. So I had to go after him. It would be different if he was not so young, and he's lived in the country all his life. And then to suddenly come to the city, and he forgets about the money—that we've only just got enough. Perhaps—I'm afraid that he doesn't seem to know very well how to take care of himself like the others. But they've lived in the city all their lives, and so it is different."

She paused and looked at him with a sort of pleading apology for the weak boy. Then she went on:

"I've come from our home to take care of him. The others have mothers and brothers, but he has only me. It's hard to keep from making him angry and yet to look after him, and so I went with my old nurse. I knew if I could find him I could bring him back with me. We got the masks and dominos from a man near the door who had them to hire. Then I went into that empty box and waited till he came by, because there was such a crowd, and the people couldn't see me. Soon after you had gone he passed and then I called to him, and he came and we went home."

She hesitated and stopped, then said hurriedly:

"When I saw you tonight, I knew you again, and I thought you would know me. I ran upstairs and put this piece of court plaster on the mole. I was afraid of your knowing me. I was afraid you would think badly of me for being there."

She was interrupted by the rising of the ladies. As she turned to go she paused and, looking at him with wistful inquiry, said:

"Do you?"

He looked at her without speaking, but shook his head.

As the men settled back into their chairs one of them, noticing Carroll still standing gazing vacantly at a window opposite, cried laughingly:

"Look at the sentimentalist lost in contemplation of the stars."

Carroll started and, taking his seat, answered quietly:

"Yes. I've been looking at a star."