"Mind your own business and don't tease!" says Molly, who had caught sight of the doctor with Honor at the gate, and has her own private opinion as to her sister's embarrassment. "Eat your dinner, Dick, and get back to your lessons. That's the best thing you can do. Can't you see," leaning over and helping herself to more salad, "that Honor is done up with the heat? I really thought I should have collapsed with it myself this morning when I was coming home, down that hot, glaring, dusty road. What did Lancelot say in his letter this morning, Doris?"
Honor looks gratefully at her younger sister, and having had time to recover herself, she tries to talk and to make a pretence of eating, though the chief part of her meat is surreptitiously received by Timothy under the table.
The conversation at length becomes general, and is chiefly about the ball, which is no further off now than the next evening.
Later on in the day Lady Woodhouse is to arrive, she having promised to chaperone her three nieces to the ball.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
"I AM LANCELOT," SAYS SIR EDWARD.
The dresses for the ball have all been finished off satisfactorily, and now that the evening of the 10th has really arrived, the three girls are standing in the drawing-room, preparatory to starting with their aunt for the Court.
They make a pretty group in their simple, white silk gowns and natural flowers. Doris is perhaps a little the most important looking, as being the eldest of the three. Standing with a handsome posy of choice hothouse flowers (sent down from London that morning by Mr. Ferrars) in her hand, she looks, as she certainly is, a very pretty and graceful girl.
Honor, with an opposition posy, which had arrived with some mystery that afternoon, and is explained with great persistency by Dick as being an offering from Ernest Hildyard, looks almost equally pretty to-night, with a soft flush upon her cheeks and a happy light in her eyes, which seems lately to have become habitual to them. But it is Molly who carries off the palm for beauty on this occasion, though not, perhaps, looking in the same ecstatic spirits as her two sisters; and her mother as she looks at her feels a little pardonable pride in the thought that probably her three daughters will be the best-looking girls in the ball-room.
"She is looking lovely to-night!" whispers the delighted mother to Honor. "I do wish Hugh were here to see her, poor fellow!"