r recent conversation with Dalibard had absorbed her thoughts
to forgetfulness of the less important demands on her attention. Her
absence had not interfered with the gayety at the tea-table, which
was frank even to noisiness as it centred round the laughing face of
Ardworth, who, though unknown to most or all of the ladies present,
beyond a brief introduction to one or two of the first comers from Sir
Miles (as the host had risen from his chess to bid them welcome), had
already contrived to make himself perfectly at home and outrageously
popular. Niched between two bouncing lasses, he had commenced
acquaintance with them in a strain of familiar drollery and fun, which
had soon broadened its circle, and now embraced the whole group in
the happy contagion of good-humour and young animal spirits. Gabriel,
allowed to sit up later than his usual hour, had not, as might have been
expected, attached himself to this circle, nor indeed to any; he might
be seen moving quietly about,--now contemplating the pictures on the
wall with a curious eye; now pausing at the whist-table, and noting the
game with the interest of an embryo gamester; now throwing himself on an
ottoman, and trying to coax towards him Dash or Ponto,--trying in vain,
for both the dogs abhorred him; yet still, through all this general
movement, had any one taken the pains to observe him closely, it might
have been sufficiently apparent that his keen, bright, restless eye,
from the corner of its long, sly lids, roved chiefly towards the three
persons whom he approached the least,--his father, Mainwaring, and Mr.
Vernon. This last had ensconced himself apart from all, in the angle
formed by one of the pilasters of the arch that divided the room, so
that he was in command, as it were, of both sections. Reclined, with the
careless grace that seemed inseparable from every attitude and motion of
his person, in one of the great velvet chairs, with a book in his hand,
which, to say truth, was turned upside down, but in the lecture of which
he seemed absorbed, he heard at one hand the mirthful laughter that
circled round young Ardworth, or, in its pauses, caught, on the other
side, muttered exclamations from the grave whist-players: "If you
had but trumped that diamond, ma'am!" "Bless me, sir, it was the best
heart!" And somehow or other, both the laughter and the exclamations
affected him alike with what then was called "the spleen,"--for the one
reminded him of his own yo