her right hand, was Sir John Capes, her antique devotee;
a pure milky-white old gentleman, with sparkling fingers, who played
Apollo to his Daphne, and was out of breath. Lord Suckling, a boy with
a boisterous constitution, and a guardsman, had his place near her left
hand, as if ready to seize it at the first whisper of encouragement
or opportunity. A very little lady of seventeen, Miss Adeline Gosling,
trembling with shyness under a cover of demureness, fell to Edward's
lot to conduct down to dinner, where he neglected her disgracefully.
His father, Sir William, was present at the table, and Lord Elling, with
whom he was in repute as a talker and a wit. Quickened with his host's
renowned good wine (and the bare renown of a wine is inspiriting),
Edward pressed to be brilliant. He had an epigrammatic turn, and though
his mind was prosaic when it ran alone, he could appear inventive and
fanciful with the rub of other minds. Now, at a table where good talking
is cared for, the triumphs of the excelling tongue are not for a moment
to be despised, even by the huge appetite of the monster Vanity. For a
year, Edward had abjured this feast. Before the birds appeared and the
champagne had ceased to make its circle, he felt that he was now at home
again, and that the term of his wandering away from society was one of
folly. He felt the joy and vigour of a creature returned to his element.
Why had he ever quitted it? Already he looked back upon Dahlia from a
prodigious distance. He knew that there was something to be smoothed
over; something written in the book of facts which had to be smeared
out, and he seemed to do it, while he drank the babbling wine and heard
himself talk. Not one man at that table, as he reflected, would consider
the bond which held him in any serious degree binding. A lady is
one thing, and a girl of the class Dahlia had sprung from altogether
another. He could not help imagining the sort of appearance she would
make there; and the thought even was a momentary clog upon his tongue.
How he used to despise these people! Especially he had despised the
young men as brainless cowards in regard to their views of women and
conduct toward them. All that was changed. He fancied now that they,
on the contrary, would despise him, if only they could be aware of the
lingering sense he entertained of his being in bondage under a sacred
obligation to a farmer's daughter.

But he had one thing to discover, and that was, w