She felt a little hot wave run over her cheek uncomfortably, and the next instant the big arm tightened its clasp of her— for just one second—not more than one. She did not know that he, himself, had seen the sudden ripple of red colour, and that the equally sudden contraction of the arm had been as unexpected to him and as involuntary as the quick wave itself. It had horrified and made him angry. He looked the next instant entirely stiff and cold.
“He did not know it happened,” Betty resolved.
“The music is going to stop,” said Mount Dunstan. “I know the waltz. We can get once round the room again before the final chord. It was to be the last note—the very last,” but he said it quite rigidly, and Betty laughed.
“Quite the last,” she answered.
The music hastened a little, and their gliding whirl became more rapid—a little faster—a little faster still—a running sweep of notes, a big, terminating harmony, and the thing was over.
“Thank you,” said Mount Dunstan. “One will have it to remember.” And his tone was slightly sardonic.
“Yes,” Betty acquiesced politely.
“Oh, not you. Only I. I have never waltzed before.”
Betty turned to look at him curiously.
“Under circumstances such as these,” he explained. “I learned to dance at a particularly hideous boys’ school in France. I abhorred it. And the trend of my life has made it quite easy for me to keep my twelve-year-old vow that I would never dance after I left the place, unless I WANTED to do it, and that, especially, nothing should make me waltz until certain agreeable conditions were fulfilled. Waltzing I approved of —out of hideous schools. I was a pig- headed, objectionable child. I detested myself even, then.”
Betty’s composure returned to her.
“I am trusting,” she remarked, “that I may secretly regard myself as one of the agreeable conditions to be fulfilled. Do not dispel my hopes roughly.”
“I will not,” he answered. “You are, in fact, several of them.”
“One breathes with much greater freedom,” she responded.
This sort of cool nonsense was safe. It dispelled feelings of tenseness, and carried them to the place where Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers awaited them. A slight stir was beginning to be felt throughout the ballroom. The royal guest was retiring, and soon the rest began to melt away. The Anstruthers, who had a long return drive before them, were among those who went first.
When Lady Anstruthers and her sister returned from the cloak room, they found Sir Nigel standing near Mount Dunstan, who was going also, and talking to him in an amiably detached manner. Mount Dunstan, himself, did not look amiable, or seem to be saying much, but Sir Nigel showed no signs of being disturbed.
“Now that you have ceased to forswear the world,” he said as his wife approached, “I hope we shall see you at Stornham. Your visits must not cease because we cannot offer you G. Selden any longer.”
He had his own reasons for giving the invitation—several of them. And there was a satisfaction in letting the fellow know, casually, that he was not in the ridiculous position of being unaware of what had occurred during his absence—that there had been visits—and also the objectionable episode of the American bounder. That the episode had been objectionable, he knew he had adroitly conveyed by mere tone and manner.
Mount Dunstan thanked him in the usual formula, and then spoke to Betty.
“G. Selden left us tremulous and fevered with ecstatic anticipation. He carried your kind letter to Mr. Vanderpoel, next to his heart. His brain seemed to whirl at the thought of what `the boys’ would say, when he arrived with it in New York. You have materialised the dream of his life!”
“I have interested my father,” Betty answered, with a brilliant smile. “He liked the romance of the Reuben S. Vanderpoel who rewarded the saver of his life by unbounded orders for the Delkoff.”
… . .
As their carriage drove away, Sir Nigel bent forward to look out of the window, and having done it, laughed a little.
“Mount Dunstan does not play the game well,” he remarked.
It was annoying that neither Betty nor his wife inquired what the game in question might be, and that his temperament forced him into explaining without encouragement.
“He should have `stood motionless with folded arms,’ or something of the sort, and `watched her equipage until it was out of sight.’ “
“And he did not?” said Betty
“He turned on his heel as soon as the door was shut.”
“People ought not to do such things,” was her simple comment. To which it seemed useless to reply.
CHAPTER XXXIII
FOR LADY JANE
There is no one thing on earth of such interest as the study of the laws of temperament, which impel, support, or entrap into folly and danger the being they rule. As a child, not old enough to give a definite name to the thing she watched and pondered on, in child fashion, Bettina Vanderpoel had thought much on this subject. As she had grown older, she had never been ignorant of the workings of her own temperament, and she had looked on for years at the laws which had wrought in her father’s being—the laws of strength, executive capacity, and that pleasure in great schemes, which is roused less by a desire for gain than for a strongly-felt necessity for action, resulting in success. She mentally followed other people on their way, sometimes asking herself how far the individual was to be praised or blamed for his treading of the path he seemed to choose. And now there was given her the opportunity to study the workings of the nature of Nigel Anstruthers, which was a curious thing.
He was not an individual to be envied. Never was man more tormented by lack of power to control his special devil, at the right moment of time, and therefore, never was there one so inevitably his own frustration. This Betty saw after the passing of but a few days, and wondered how far he was conscious or unconscious of the thing. At times it appeared to her that he was in a state of unrest—that he was as a man wavering between lines of action, swayed at one moment by one thought, at another by an idea quite different, and that he was harried because he
