He saw that Miranda was already near the window, that Lady Donnisthorpe was approaching him. He followed instantly in Miranda's steps, and Lady Donnisthorpe, perceiving his attention, had the complaisance to turn aside. For the window opened on to a balcony wherein discreet palms sheltered off a nook. There was one of Lady Donnisthorpe's guests who did not share her ladyship's complacency. A censorious dowager sitting near to the window had kept an alert eye upon the couple in the recess during the last three dances; and each time that her daughter--a pretty girl with hair of the palest possible gold, and light blue eyes that were dancing with a child's delight at all the wonders of a first season--returned to the shelter of her portly frame, the dowager drew moral lessons for her benefit from the text of the oblivious couple. She remarked with pain upon their increasing infatuation for each other; she pointed out to her daughter a hapless youth who tiptoed backwards and forwards before Mrs. Warriner, with a dance-card in his hand, too timorous to interrupt the intimate conversation; and when Mrs. Warriner dropped a glove as she stepped over the window-sill on to the balcony, the dowager nudged her daughter with an elbow.
"Now, Mabel, there's a coquette," she said.
Charnock was close behind, and overheard the triumphant remark.
"I beg your pardon," he said politely, "it was the purest accident."
The dowager bridled; her face grew red; she raised her tortoiseshell glasses and annihilated Charnock with a single stare. Charnock had the audacity to smile. He stooped and picked up the glove. Mrs. Warriner had indeed dropped the glove by accident; but since it fell in Charnock's way and since he picked it up, it was to prove, like the handbill at Gibraltar and the draft on Lloyd's bank, a thing trivial in itself, but the opportunity of strange events.
CHAPTER V
[WHEREIN CHARNOCK AND MIRANDA IMPROVE THEIR ACQUAINTANCESHIP IN A BALCONY]
Lady Donnisthorpe's house stood in Queen Anne's Gate, and the balcony overlooked St. James's Park. There Charnock found Miranda; he leaned his elbows upon the iron balustrade, and for a while neither of them spoke. It was a clear night of early June, odorous with messages of hedgerows along country lanes and uplands of young grass, and of bells ringing over meadows. In front of them the dark trees of the Park rippled and whispered to the stray breaths of wind; between the trees one line of colourless lamps marked the footpath across the bridge to the Mall; and the carriages on the outer roadway ringed that enclosure of thickets and lawns with flitting sparks of fire.
Charnock was still holding the glove which he had picked up on the window-sill.
"That's mine," said Miranda; "thank you," and she stretched out her hand for it.