these recollections came across her, her step faltered and
her colour faded from its glow: she paused a moment, cast a mournful
glance round the room, and then tore herself away, descended the lofty
staircase, passed the stone hall, melancholy with old banners and rusted
crests, and bore her beauty and her busy heart into the thickening and
gay crowd.

Her eye looked once more round for the graceful form of Godolphin:
but he was not visible; and she had scarcely satisfied herself of this
before Lord Erpingham, the hero of the evening, approached and claimed
her hand.

"I have just performed my duty," said he, with a gallantry of speech not
common to him, "now for my reward. I have danced the first dance with
Lady Margaret Midgecombe: I come, according to your promise, to dance
the second with you."

There was something in these words that stung one of the morbid
remembrances in Miss Vernon's mind. Lady Margaret Midgecombe, in
ordinary life, would have been thought a good-looking, vulgar girl:--she
was a Duke's daughter and she was termed a Hebe. Her little nose, and
her fresh colour, and her silly but not unmalicious laugh, were called
enchanting; and all irregularities of feature and faults of shape were
absolutely turned into merits by that odd commendation, so common with
us--"A deuced fine girl; none of your regular beauties."

Not only in the county of ----shire, but in London, had Lady Margaret
Midgecombe been set up as the rival beauty of Constance Vernon. And
Constance, far too lovely, too cold, too proud, not to acknowledge
beauty in others, where it really existed, was nevertheless unaffectedly
indignant at a comparison so unworthy; she even, at times, despised her
own claims to admiration, since claims so immeasurably inferior could
be put into competition with them. Added to this sore feeling for Lady
Margaret, was one created by Lady Margaret's mother. The Duchess of
Winstoun was a woman of ordinary birth--the daughter of a peer of
great wealth but new family. She had married, however, one of the most
powerful dukes in the peerage;--a stupid, heavy, pompous man, with four
castles, eight parks, a coal-mine, a tin-mine, six boroughs, and about
thirty livings. Inactive and reserved, the duke was seldom seen in
public: the care of supporting his rank devolved on the duchess; and
she supported it with as much solemnity of purpose as if she had been
a cheesemonger's daughter. Stately, insolent, and coarse; a