breeches, a lace frill, paste buckles on his shoes, a black scarf over his broken arm.
"What do you represent?" Sally asked him.
"I am, I hope, a Gentleman."
"You're stunning, if you want my opinion."
"Thank you, I could say more than that, but I won't. You'll have enough compliments without mine."
"They wouldn't be worth much without yours," Sally said with a seriousness she rarely showed. "Please be nice and friendly tonight, Merry. I need it."
"Has anything happened?"
"Only this," she waved her hand to include the great empty room. "It's going to be mine. And I am wondering what I am going to do with it."
Under the high ceiling, and in that vast desert of polished floor, the two of them seemed no bigger than china figures set on a shelf. Sally with her crisp silks, and Merry with his lace frills, might have been made of Dresden porcelain, so utterly artificial were they and so absolutely in keeping with the rose garlands and the Fragonard panels.
Then, suddenly, in the arched entrance to the ballroom appeared a figure that was not in keeping—a figure which belonged not between walls, but to the out-of-doors—to summer twilights with a thin moon gleaming—to spectral midnights with a wild wind blowing—to clear, white dawns in a birch forest—!
It was Hildegarde!
"Oh," she said, when she saw them, "everybody is
