When they reached the Gesù, she said, "I suppose you have had a very dull walk. I know I was very silent, but you must feel that it was your fault. I saw that you did not care to talk.... Here we are, however, at our destination, so good-bye."
She held out her hand, and as he took it he answered, "I do not quite understand what you mean?"
Flora smiled, turned away, and went up the steps as Mrs. Adair and Mr. Lyne wished him good-day. He stood for a moment until he saw them go into the convent, and then walked slowly away murmuring to himself, "What could she have meant by saying, 'You must feel that it was your fault?'... The look, too, which accompanied those words seemed to ask some question.... But what is all this to me?"
He quickened his pace, and soon arrived at his apartments in the Piazza di Trajana.
[CHAPTER VII.]
On Friday morning—the morning of the Eltons' soirée—Marie Arbi, who had been with the Adairs since the Monday before, was in a state of great excitement, mingled with no little terror, about her first ball. Flora could but laugh at the timid fears of the world's novice, for she knew that her prettiness and simplicity would amply cover any want of self-possession, and, indeed, render her doubly attractive.
One moment Marie was in ecstasies of delight with her dress and wreath; the next she would rush into the drawing-room to Flora and ask a score of questions. Then she would declare that she knew she should be horribly gauche, and looked half ready to cry over her anticipated awkwardness. But a word from Flora about her toilette would set her off again into a rapture of admiration, and, with all a Frenchwoman's delight in the details of dress, she would descant on each particular of it. All this made Flora think of her own first ball, and of how comparatively indifferent she was about it, although she really was fond of dancing; but she had never possessed any of that almost childish gaiety which characterised Marie.
A few minutes before nine o'clock the important business of dressing was satisfactorily completed, and the young ladies went into the drawing-room to Mrs. Adair, who was already dressed. Both the girls were in white. Marie's dress was trimmed with lily of the valley and pink convolvulus; she wore a wreath to match this trimming, and necklace and earrings of topaz. Flora's was looped up with bunches of scarlet geraniums, and a spray or two of the same flowers gleamed through the masses of her hair; she wore a band of pearls round her neck, and earrings to correspond. Marie was, according to all rule, by far the prettier of the two, as she stood there with her black eyes dancing merrily, and her full red lips parted in eager expectation; her short plump figure harmonised, too, so well with the child-like expression of her face. Flora looked well also, and her slighter and more delicately formed figure gave to her a grace which was quite her own.