tutelage so able.

Although trembling and suffused with terrified blushes, all her old
shyness in possession, Mr. Abergenny was so admirable a partner, he
gave her so many courteous hints, he kept her so persistently in the
thick of the dancing, where critical eyes could hardly follow her,
that her confidence not only returned, but before she had completed
the circuit of the room three times she was vastly enjoying herself.
She danced round and square dances with her various admirers for the
next hour, and when the country dance was at its height she found
herself tripping alone between the long files with no return of
bashfulness and no less grace than Lady Mary herself; forgetting that
there could be no better preparation for grace in the ball-room than
years of free exercise out of doors.

She abandoned herself to the new and unanticipated pleasure, and not
only of dancing but of being the acknowledged belle of the night.
Beyond the intoxication of the moment nothing existed. Once indeed,
she met Warner's eyes, and they flashed with surprise and rage, but
she forgot him and danced until even her strong frame could stand no
more, and she went to bed with the dawn and slept till afternoon.

CHAPTER XV

Depressed with reaction and heavy with unwonted sleeping by daylight,
she was glad to go from her dressing-table to the carriage waiting to
take herself and her aunt for the customary drive. It was but a moment
before her mind was startled into its accustomed activity.

"Mr. Warner has disappeared again." Mrs. Nunn tilted her lace parasol
against the slanting sun. "Poor Maria!"

"Disappeared?"

"That is the general interpretation. Maria, with whom he was to dine
to-night, received a note from him this morning asking to be excused
as he was going away for some time; and when Hunsdon rushed down to
Hamilton House--unshaved and without his plunge--he was told that the
poet was gone; none of the servants could say where nor when he would
return. So that is probably the last of the reformed poet. I suppose
last night's excitement proved too much for him."

Anne's feeling was almost insupportable, but she forced her tone into
the register which Miss Bargarny and her kind would employ to express
lively detached regret. "That would be quite dreadful, and most
ungrateful. But I do not believe--anything of the sort. No doubt all
that reading of his own work stirred his muse and he has shut himself
up to write."