He was talking to the empty air. A ripple of that elfin laughter from the top of the hill was all that answered him. Sir Hubert, Vansittart, and Major Baddington were all standing round a most melancholy specimen of the genus fly, the very oldest and mouldiest of one-horse landaus, which had broken down hopelessly on the top of the hill.
“We knew that the springs were weak,” said a silver-clear voice out of a swansdown hood. “They’ve been getting weaker and weaker ever since we’ve had anything to do with the fly; but we had no idea the shafts were all wrong.”
“The shafts were right enough when we started, miss,” growled a voice that was half muffled in a red comforter, such a comforter as denotes the rustic fly-man. “It was your weight coming up the hill as did it.”
“My weight!” cried Swansdownhood, lifting herself up on her springy feet like a feminine Mercury. “Do I look such a Daniel Lambert?”
Her hood fell off with that arch toss of the head, and looking at her in the vivid moonlight it seemed to Jack Vansittart as if that jocular exclamation of his had been well founded, and that the woman who stood before him on the crest of the hill, her beauty and her whiteness shining out against the steel-blue sky—“like a finer light in light”—was enchanting enough to have stood for Titania.
She was very tall, but so slim and willowy of form that her height made her no less sylphlike—a queen of sylphs, perhaps, but assuredly of that aerial family. She was dazzlingly fair, and her small head was crowned with a nimbus of pale gold hair, in which there sparkled a galaxy of diamond starlets. Her small nose was tip-tilted, but with a tilt so archly delicate as to be more beautiful than the purest Grecian, or so Vansittart thought, seeing her thus for the first time in the glamour of night and moonshine, and with all the piquancy of the unexpected.
“The horse fell down, and the shafts went crash,” said another young person, who presented to view only a nose and narrow slip of face between the folds of a red plaid shawl, just such a shawl as a well-to-do farmer’s wife might have worn driving to market. “I thought we should all be killed.”
“And so you would have been, if I hadn’t put the brake on sharp, and got down and sat on ’is ’ed,” said the fly-man. “That horse didn’t ought to have been sent out on such roads as this, and if I’d been master he wouldn’t have been.”
“We won’t trouble you for your opinions, my friend,” said Sir Hubert, throwing a florin lightly into the man’s hand. “You’d better take your beast home, and give yourself a hot drink. I’ll take care of Miss Marchant and her sisters.”
“Oh, but really,” said Swansdownhood, “it is immensely good of you—only they had better send a fly for us after the dance. We can’t encroach upon you for the home journey.”
“Why not? Of course we shall take you home. Come along; I’m afraid you’re catching cold while we’re talking.”
He marched the three girls—the spokeswoman and tallest all in white from top to toe, the second with a black lace frock showing below her Stuart shawl, the third muffled in a blue opera cloak and a blue Shetland scarf, commonly called a cloud.
“Here are the Miss Marchants, come to claim your hospitality,” said Sir Hubert to his wife; whereupon Maud replied, graciously—
“Oh, how do you do, you poor things? Pray come in. How cold you must be! Did your carriage break down? How dreadful! I’m afraid there’s not much heat left in our foot-warmers, but it is tolerably warm here still”—the atmosphere inside the bus was tropical—“and I hope you’ll be able to make yourselves comfortable.”
“Such a dreadful intrusion!”
“Such a herd of us!”
“How you must all detest us!” cried three fresh young voices all at once.
The three Champernownes and the Green maintained a stolid silence. Those four pairs of eyes were coldly appraising the intruders—their faces, their dress, their social status, everything about them.
The fair tall girl in the swansdown hood was very pretty. That fact the most unfriendly observer could not deny. Whether that dazzling fairness was in some part artificial remained to be proved under a more searching light than the omnibus lamp; but even if that alabaster complexion were due to blanc de something the girl’s eyes were real—lovely dancing blue-grey eyes, softened by dark brown lashes. Her nose was the prettiest thing in that unrecognized order of noses; mouth and chin were in perfect harmony; and she looked round at the strange faces with the sweetest smile, as if she had never suffered from prejudice or undeserved disdain.
The other two girls were of the same type, but not so pretty. The blue girl was freckled and weather-beaten; the Stuart plaid girl was too pale. Titania had taken the lion’s share of the family beauty.
But their dress—that at least afforded widest scope for the scorner. The swansdown hood was of the year one, or perhaps might have been fashionable in the historic winter of the Crimean war; the blue cloud and tawdry blue opera cloak suggested all that is commonest in cheap finery; and what manner of surroundings could a girl have whose people allowed her to go to a hunt ball with her head and shoulders skewered in a tartan shawl with a blanket pin?
“We are taking no chaperon,” said Titania, brightly. “Mrs. Ponto is to chaperon us.”
Mrs. Ponto was the wife of a solicitor at Mandelford, the little town where the ball was being given. It was the first hunt ball there had been at Mandelford within the memory of Sussex, and the fact that this ball was taking place at Mandelford was due to the enterprise of a local cabinetmaker, who had built a public hall or assembly room at the back of his shop, and had thus provided a place
