The tide of dancers, influx and reflux, brought Dulcie to her side, for a brief space, without a partner in her train.
“Rhea,” said the girl suddenly and sharply, as if the words were startled out of her, “how beautiful you are! I never knew it till tonight! I do not wonder that—” She broke off as abruptly as she had begun.
Rhea was a little surprised. “It is very good of you to pay me compliments,” she answered. “I think my dress should have some of the credit of my good looks.”
Those two made “a picture fair to look on,” as, for a few seconds, they stood side by side; the elder woman tall, queenly in her delicately-tinted brocades, and the younger, in her soft, floating white draperies, with her rose-leaf complexion and large upturned eyes that seemed, to Rhea’s fancy, to have suddenly caught a strangely pathetic expression.
Over their heads hung a life-size portrait of a Glencross ancestress, in early Victorian dress, with hair arranged à l’Impératrice Eugénie. The portrait was the work of a notable artist, but the living picture, standing beneath it, so to speak, took all the poetry out of it—modernised it, vulgarised it.
The band recommenced; Dulcie was carried off by an eager partner, and Rhea found her attention claimed now by this person, now by that. The music had changed from the smooth, gliding valse to a sprightly gavotte. All the same, however, to Rhea’s fancy, it held the old refrain—there was no silencing it, no getting rid of it. It was in vain that she left the ballroom and went back to the drawing-rooms, the music seemed to follow and haunt her there, with its perpetual iteration of “Shall it be ‘yes’—shall it be ‘no’?” Beneath the wearisome round of society platitudes, to which she was forced to listen and to reply, she found herself saying to herself vaguely, dreamily: “What is love? What is love? In the old, foolish, girlish days I knew, or thought I knew. But now—” she broke off, mentally shrugging her shoulders at herself.
After a time, the society platitudes began to give place to society adieux—a touch of the fingertips, or a nod, a smile. The rooms began to get empty; the hall below to become thronged; the roll of departing carriages became prolonged and ceaseless. The music seemed to float into the room in louder, fuller tones now that the hum of intervening voices had ceased; the band had had orders to play so long as there were half-a-dozen couples to stand up on the perfect floor; so Rhea conjectured that the ballroom was not as yet deserted. Here, however, in the empty drawing-room, her presence no longer seemed a necessity. In another quarter of an hour, at farthest, she knew that the last of her guests would have departed; and that Lord Carthewe, sure of finding her alone, would be making his way to her side to receive his final answer. Now, what was that answer to be? Five minutes alone in perfect quietude, to face her heart, to face herself, she felt was an absolute necessity to her.
Outside, over the green park, she knew day was dawning. The cool air of the morning came flowing in through an open window. That window led into a covered verandah which ran round the side of the house and ended in the ballroom. It was lighted with Chinese lanterns and prettily furnished with lounge seats and big, flowering shrubs. It seemed to suggest to Rhea a cool retreat, where a few minutes of quiet thought could be indulged in.
She took up the thread of her thinking where she had let it go half-an-hour previously. “In the old days,” she said to herself, moving slowly, dreamily, amid the big flower-jars and heavily-scented shrubs, “I knew what love was. It was to me, then, just a blind stretching forth of the hands to grasp, and then to hold and to keep against all heaven and all earth. But is it in me now thus to grasp, to hold, to keep—” She broke off abruptly, coming to a standstill alike in thought and movement.
Was that not someone or something moving among the shadows at the farther end of the verandah, where, by a small flight of steps, it led into the ballroom.
A second glance showed that that someone was Trevor Yorke.
“I have been waiting here for the past two hours, to see and speak to you,” he said, in a low, nervous tone, as he advanced rapidly towards her. “No, no, not in there!” he added, as Rhea made a step forward as if to pass on to the ballroom. “I must, must see you alone tonight. I am going away tomorrow to Africa, for years, and perhaps forever, and I must—I will say my goodbye to you before I go.”
“Going away to Africa!” repeated Rhea blankly. “Do your people know—do they like the idea?”
“What does it matter to me what they like or don’t like,” he answered, almost fiercely. Then he suddenly caught both her hands in his, crying out passionately, “Rhea, Rhea, look at me—don’t turn your face away! Do you not see that I am brokenhearted?”
He stood beside her, a tall, slim figure, the figure that gives one the impression of having been only just emancipated from an Eton jacket—the swinging Chinese lantern throwing a curious glare of colour on his haggard boyish face.
Rhea made no effort to release her hands, feeling it was, indeed, a goodbye clasp.
“My poor, poor boy!” was all she said, in a pitying tone.
“Yes, always that,” he said bitterly. “Always your poor boy—never anything else. You won’t give me credit for a man’s passion, a man’s heart! And when I am gone, you and everyone else will say ‘the best thing he could have done! He’ll come back cured in a year or so!’ But I’m not going
