m a dance?" Then Miss Pink,
smiling her forced smile, colouring a little, answered: "Oh! I think
so!" and screening her empty card, wrote on it the name of Gathercole,
spelling it passionately in the district that he proposed, about the
second extra.

But when the youth had murmured that it was hot, and passed, she
relapsed into her attitude of hopeless expectation, into her patient,
sourish smile.

Mothers, slowly fanning their faces, watched their daughters, and in
their eyes could be read all the story of those daughters' fortunes. As
for themselves, to sit hour after hour, dead tired, silent, or talking
spasmodically--what did it matter, so long as the girls were having a
good time! But to see them neglected and passed by! Ah! they smiled,
but their eyes stabbed like the eyes of an offended swan; they longed to
pluck young Gathercole by the slack of his dandified breeches, and drag
him to their daughters--the jackanapes!

And all the cruelties and hardness of life, its pathos and unequal
chances, its conceit, self-forgetfulness, and patience, were presented
on the battle-field of this Kensington ball-room.

Here and there, too, lovers--not lovers like Francie's, a peculiar
breed, but simply lovers--trembling, blushing, silent, sought each other
by flying glances, sought to meet and touch in the mazes of the dance,
and now and again dancing together, struck some beholder by the light in
their eyes.

Not a second before ten o'clock came the Jameses--Emily, Rachel,
Winifred (Dartie had been left behind, having on a former occasion drunk
too much of Roger's champagne), and Cicely, the youngest, making her
debut; behind them, following in a hansom from the paternal mansion
where they had dined, Soames and Irene.

All these ladies had shoulder-straps and no tulle--thus showing at once,
by a bolder exposure of flesh, that they came from the more fashionable
side of the Park.

Soames, sidling back from the contact of the dancers, took up a position
against the wall. Guarding himself with his pale smile, he stood
watching. Waltz after waltz began and ended, couple after couple brushed
by with smiling lips, laughter, and snatches of talk; or with set lips,
and eyes searching the throng; or again, with silent, parted lips, and
eyes on each other. And the scent of festivity, the odour of flowers,
and hair, of essences that women love, rose suffocatingly in the heat of
the summer night.

Silent, with something of scor