"Did I give you any advice?" Kitty wrinkled up her white brows. "I don't recollect."
Mary looked at her sharply—suspiciously. Kitty, quite conscious of the look, was straightway pricked by an elfish curiosity. Could she carry him off?—trouble Mary's possession there and then? She believed she could. She was well aware of a certain relation between herself and Cliffe, if, at least, she chose to develop it. Should she? Her vanity insisted that Mary could not prevent it.
However, she restrained herself and moved on. Presently looking back, she saw them still together, Cliffe leaning against the pedestal of a bust, Mary beside him. There was an animation in her eyes, a rose of pleasure on her cheek which stirred in Kitty a queer sudden sympathy. "I am a little beast!" she said to herself. "Why shouldn't she be happy?"
Then, perceiving Lady Tranmore at the end of the ballroom, she made her way thither, surrounded by a motley crowd of friends. She walked as though on air, "raining influence." And as Lady Tranmore caught the glitter of the diamond crescent, and beheld the small divinity beneath it, she too smiled with pleasure, like the other spectators on Kitty's march. The dress was monstrously costly. She knew that. But she forgot the inroad on William's pocket, and remembered only to be proud of William's wife. Since the Parhams' party, indeed, the unlooked-for submission of Kitty, and the clearing of William's prospects, Lady Tranmore had been sweetness itself to her daughter-in-law.
But her fine face and brow were none the less inclined to frown. She herself as Katharine of Aragon would have shed a dignity on any scene, but she was in no sympathy with what she beheld.
"We shall soon all of us be ashamed of this kind of thing," she declared to Kitty. "Just as people now are beginning to be ashamed of enormous houses and troops of servants."
"No,—please!—only bored with them!" said Kitty. "There are so many other ways now of amusing yourself,—that's all."
"Well, this way will die out," said Lady Tranmore. "The cost of it is too scandalous,—people's consciences prick them."
Kitty vowed she did not believe there was a conscience in the room; and then, as the music struck up, she carried off her companion to some steps overlooking the great marble gallery, where they had a better view of the two lines of dancers.
It is said that as a nation the English have no gift for pageants. Yet every now and then—as no doubt in the Elizabethan masque—they show a strange felicity in the art. Certainly the dance that followed would have been difficult to surpass even in the ripe days and mother-lands of pageantry. To the left, a long line, consisting mainly of young girls in their first bloom, dressed as Gainsborough and his great contemporaries delighted to paint these flowers of England,—the folds of plain white muslin crossed over the young breast, a black velvet at the throat, a rose in the hair, the simple skirt showing the small pointed feet, and sometimes a broad sash defining the slender waist. Here were Stanleys, Howards, Percys, Villiers, Butlers, Osbornes,—soft slips of girls bearing the names of England's rough and turbulent youth, bearing themselves to-night with a shy or laughing dignity, as though the touch of history and romance were on them. And facing them,—the youths of the same families, no less handsome than their sisters and brides,—in Romney's blue coats, or the splendid red of Reynolds and Gainsborough.
To and fro swayed the dancers, under the innumerable candles that filled the arched roof and upper walls of the ballroom; and each time the lines parted they disclosed at the farther end another pageant, to which that of the dance was in truth subordinate,—a dais hung with blue and silver, and upon it a royal lady whose beauty, then in its first bloom, has been a national possession, since as the "sea-king's daughter" she brought it in dowry to her adopted country. To-night she blazed in jewels as a Valois queen, with her court around her, and as the dancers receded, each youth and maiden seemed instinctively to turn towards her as roses to the sun.
"Oh, beautiful, beautiful world!" said Kitty to herself, in an ecstasy, pressing
