People had been somewhat startled by Lady Glencross’s good-nature towards her young relative, and were inclined to read a double motive in it—a wish to set off cultured beauty and town-bred grace by juxtaposition with simplicity and (perhaps) gaucherie.
“Muslin sets off brocade and muslin suffers proportionately,” they said. “Sweet seventeen cannot hold its own against thirty-one, backed up by Bond Street milliners and family diamonds.”
The wiseacres were to be a little out in their reckoning. If sweet seventeen had to go to the wall, it would only be after a neck and neck race; it ran the milliners and the diamonds hard on the night of the ball, at any rate.
“She is all violet eyes and white tulle,” was Lord Chenevix’s first verdict upon the débutante, as he bowed his introduction to her. Ten minutes later he had something else to say. It was: “She might be a little angel who has somehow fluttered out of Paradise, and can’t find her way back! There’s no dancing-master in this world who could have given her that grace and elegance, I’ll undertake to say. Anything more exquisite than that last round of cotillon I have never seen in any ballroom.”
Lord Carthewe was Dulcie’s partner in that cotillon. He appeared bent on strictly carrying out Lady Glencross’s wish to the very letter, and, after his first shake hands with her at the drawing-room door, had drifted into the ballroom, and she had only caught an occasional glimpse of him over the heads or between the shoulders of the swaying crowd of dancers.
“Can’t make it out—think there must be something up between the two,” said young Hartley, of the Lancers, to a tall, slim, smooth-faced young fellow who stood beside him. “Twycross laid me a fiver the match would come off within six weeks—fancy he’ll have to pay up, after all.”
“I think you and Twycross might find something better to stake your fivers on than a lady’s private affairs,” answered the young man thus addressed.
He spoke with a hot vehemence, that brought all the blood to his fair, boyish face. It was no secret that Trevor Yorke, aged exactly one-and-twenty, was more than “overshoes in love” with the fair widow of thirty-one.
Lady Glencross’s brocade made a pretty spot of colour against a background of greenery, as she stood for a few minutes watching the dancers. She was a tall, fair, pale woman, with keen, deep-seated eyes, and a pleasant “society smile.” She had taken special pains with her dress that night. It was of a delicate shade of salmon-pink, looped back with brown orchids, over a petticoat richly embroidered in silver. Her hair, drawn low on her forehead, was crowned with a diamond tiara, and the Glencross diamonds and emeralds sparkled on her white neck and arms.
That “wind-waved tulip-bed” of swaying, many-tinted dancers, held but one form for Lady Glencross—that of Lord Carthewe.
“How kind it was of him,” she said to herself, “to single out little Dulcie in this way and show her such marked attention!” How loyal, too, to herself thus to carry out her wishes to the very letter and not distract her by attentions that might retard the answering of the difficult question which, although it had been before her mind all through the week, appeared as far off as ever from being set at rest. Amid all these surrounding distractions it kept its grip upon her mind.
“Shall it be ‘yes,’ shall it be ‘no?’ ” she found herself whispering to herself; and to her fancy the band in the gallery overhead caught up the words as a sort of refrain and gave it out in the light valse tune which before had seemed to her wordless.
It was a variant on Marguerite’s question to the flower-petals: “he loves me, he loves me not.” Lady Glencross toyed nervously with the orchids in the bosom of her dress, half wondering if she interrogated them what answer they would give.
“Lady Glencross,” said Lord Chenevix’s voice at her elbow; “may I find you a seat? Now, I must compliment you on your little cousin’s dancing. I have come to the conclusion that she must have learnt it in some other sphere. Anything more graceful and poetic I have never before seen. They say she has been staying with you for some little time; now tell me, how is it I have never before had the pleasure of meeting her?”
Lady Glencross looked her satisfaction. She liked to feel that little Dulcie did credit to her blood relationship; that, surrounded as she was by some of the best-bred, best-dressed women that England numbered in her aristocracy, she yet shone out as a star among them all. Dulcie, she explained, had been staying with friends in Paris for the past three weeks; had, in fact, only returned on the previous day on purpose for the ball. Yes, she was graceful; and certainly had improved in her good looks during her stay in Paris. She was glad, too, to be able to say that Dulcie had instincts in the art of dress, and the good dresser, like the poet, must be born, not made.
The cotillon came to an end; the dancers in a stream flowed past into the pleasanter atmosphere of corridors and conservatories.
“Isn’t it possible to shake your resolve? Will you not give me one valse—one, only one?” said a voice over her shoulder.
Lord Chenevix drew back to make way for Trevor Yorke.
Something in the young man’s voice startled her, yet she could scarcely have said what.
She answered a little coldly: “I dance only by deputy now. You will be fortunate if you can get Dulcie to give you a dance; she is very much in request tonight.” And the thought in her mind as she said this was: “Now what a good thing it would be if Dulcie were to take this foolish boy in hand, and make him fall in love with her. He was, in all respects, a
