But he was, fortunately, in a minority. The bulk of the healthy open-air-looking young men and the pretty country-bred girls who footed it to the strains of a brisk and enlivening string band were not so particular as he. They smiled at the mishaps of others and laughed at their own, and enjoyed themselves thoroughly, as young men and women do who are not surfeited with pleasure. Their elders looked on from the rout seats placed round the room, or from their place of vantage on the daïs, and in the intervals of the babel of talk—for nearly all of them knew one another and had a great deal to say—thought of their own young days and were pleased to see their pleasure repeated by their sons and daughters. There is no ball like a country ball, not too overwhelmingly invaded from London or elsewhere. It has the essence of sociability, where people meet who do not meet too often, and there is something for the young ones to do and the old ones to look on at. If the Bobby Trenches who happen upon it compare it unfavourably with more splendid entertainments, it is to be doubted if those entertainments are so much enjoyed by those who take part in them, except perhaps by the novices, to whom all gaiety is glamour.
The Squire, sitting on the daïs as became a man of his position in the county, scanned the assembly after having conducted Lady Aldeburgh through the mazes of the opening quadrille, and the frown which had left his face for the past few hours, but had sat there almost invariably during the past month, appeared again. Lady Aldeburgh was talking to old Lord Meadshire, his kinsman, who in spite of age and chronic asthma was still an inveterate frequenter of local festivities, and he had a moment's interval in which his trouble rolled back upon him. He had had a dim hope that Dick, who for the first time in his life, except when he was in South Africa, had not come home for Christmas, might show up at Bathgate for this occasion. It had been a very small hope, for nothing had been heard from him, and he had even left them to take it for granted that he had put off Captain Vernon, the friend whom he had asked to stay at Kencote for the balls. And, furthermore, if he should be there it would be as a guest of Lady George Dubec, who was known still to be at Blaythorn. But even that disagreeable condition did not entirely do away with the Squire's desire to set eyes on his son, for whose presence he longed more and more as the days went on. But there was no Dick to be seen amongst the red-coated men in the room, and as yet there was no Lady George Dubec.
But as he looked over the moving crowd of dancers, and the bordering rows of men and matrons sitting and standing, his bushy brows contracted still more, for he saw her come in beneath the musicians' gallery at the other end of the hall with Miss Dexter, and, which caused him still further disquietude, saw her instantly surrounded by a crowd of men. He turned his head away with an impatient shrug and broke into the conversation between Lady Aldeburgh and Lord Meadshire. But this did not save him, for Lord Meadshire, whose old twinkling eyes were everywhere, said in his low husky voice, "There's the lady I met driving yesterday. Tell me who she is, my dear Edward, and relieve my curiosity."
The Squire, mumbling inaudibly, got up from his seat and, turning his back upon the hall, entered into a conversation with the wife of the Master of the South Meadshire, whom he disliked, but who happened to be the only lady disengaged at the moment. But she said, when she had answered his first remark, "There is Lady George. She looks handsomer than ever"; and turning his back again he went out into a room where there was a buffet and swallowed a glass of champagne, although he knew that a tablespoonful would have brought him discomfort.
Virginia was dressed in a gown of shimmering blue green which had the effect of moonlight. She had a row of turquoises round her slim neck. Her colour was higher than usual and her eyes sparkled. No one of those who pressed round her admiring her beauty and gay charm could have guessed that it was excitement of no pleasurable sort that brought the light to her eyes and the laughter to her lips. But Miss Dexter, standing demurely by her side, dressed in black, her light hair combed unbecomingly back from her broad forehead, and receiving with equanimity the crumbs of invitation that fell from her friend's richly spread table, knew with what shrinking Virginia had brought herself to make her appearance here. Both of them knew very well why the Squire had no more been seen in the hunting field since that first day; both of them had been aware of him the moment they had entered the room, had seen his movements, and interpreted them correctly.
Virginia was soon dancing with Bobby Trench, who had drawn her impatiently away from her suitors, telling her that the valse was half over and that she could fill up her card later.
"Jove!" he said, when they had danced once round the room in silence, "it's a relief to come across a friend amongst all these clodhoppers. How on earth do you find yourself here?"
"I'm living near here at present," she said. "How do you?"
"Oh, I'm a visitor—a non-paying guest in a house like a Hydropathic Establishment, or what I imagine one to be like. Fine house, but mixed company."
"Then if you are a guest you ought not to say so," said Virginia, whose thoughts so ran on Kencote that it was the first house that occurred to her as possibly affording him hospitality.