crowd, exchanging
greetings here and there as he went, and so reached the ballroom during
a pause in the dancing. He looked round for Lady O'Moy, but he could see
her nowhere, and would never have found her had not Carruthers pointed
out a knot of officers and assured him that the lady was in the heart of
it and in imminent peril of being suffocated.

Thither the captain bent his steps, looking neither to right nor left in
his singleness of purpose. Thus it happened that he saw neither O'Moy,
who had just arrived, nor the massive, decorated bulk of Marshal
Beresford, with whom the adjutant stood in conversation on the skirts of
the throng that so assiduously worshipped at her ladyship's shrine.

Captain Tremayne went through the group with all a sapper's skill at
piercing obstacles, and so came face to face with the lady of his quest.
Seeing her so radiant now, with sparkling eyes and ready laugh, it was
difficult to conceive her haunted by any such anxieties as Miss Armytage
had mentioned. Yet the moment she perceived him, as if his presence
acted as a reminder to lift her out of the delicious present, something
of her gaiety underwent eclipse.

Child of impulse that she was, she gave no thought to her action and the
construction it might possibly bear in the minds of men chagrined and
slighted.

"Why, Ned," she cried, "you have kept me waiting." And with a complete
and charming ignoring of the claims of all who had been before him, and
who were warring there for precedence of one another, she took his arm
in token that she yielded herself to him before even the honour was so
much as solicited.

With nods and smiles to right and left--a queen dismissing her
court--she passed on the captain's arm through the little crowd that
gave way before her dismayed and intrigued, and so away.

O'Moy, who had been awaiting a favourable moment to present the marshal
by the marshal's own request, attempted to thrust forward now with
Beresford at his side. But the bowing line of officers whose backs were
towards him effectively barred his progress, and before they had broken
up that formation her ladyship and her cavalier were out of sight, lost
in the moving crowd.

The marshal laughed good-humouredly. "The infallible reward of
patience," said he. And O'Moy laughed with him. But the next moment he
was scowling at what he overheard.

"On my soul, that was impudence!" an Irish infantryman had protested.

"Have you ever hear