God! who can tread upon the breathing ground,
Nor feel Thee present, where Thy smiles abound?"
The whole air seemed full of incense and poetry when the light-footed Marion, with a bounding and elastic step, set forth on her solitary walk towards Portobello, joyous as a bird in spring, pleased with the whole world, and admiring everything with a lightness of heart that cast its sunshine on all she saw. Marion delighted in a wild sense of liberty now, when she contrasted it with her long years of endurance at Mrs. Penfold's; and equipped in exactly such a pink gingham dress as Agnes had censured on Clara Granville, with the free air, like liquid sunshine, playing about her glowing cheek, and her light ringlets fluttering in the breeze, the excitement of her spirits became such that she could have run with pleasure across the daisied meadows, and, "glad as the wild bee on his glossy wing," longed to reach the craggy heights of Arthur Seat, or to linger beneath the old thorns already fragrant with blossoms, and steeped in dew.
Marion had picked some flowers as fresh and blooming as herself, while she hurried through the more inhabited parts of the sanctuary, but when passing beneath the palace windows, her steps were arrested for a moment by hearing the sounds of mirth and music. "Can it be!" thought she, in astonishment, "Lady Towercliffe's ball is yet at its zenith!"
Pitying the dancers much more than she envied them, Marion looked at the scene of glorious beauty around her, and was hurrying forward, humming a light barcarolle in concert with the thousand birds in full chorus on every side, when suddenly a loud shout caused her to start and turn around. Marion now perceived with astonishment that a window of Lady Towercliffe's apartment had been hastily opened, and Sir Patrick stood on the balcony waving his handkerchief impetuously for her to stop, and a moment afterwards she saw him eagerly running after her across the fields without his hat.
"Marion! you lucky girl! stop there!" exclaimed he with breathless animation. "We are all at breakfast, and require one lady more to make up a last quadrille, so come along; you are my prisoner! What makes you look so aghast? Who ever heard of a girl not liking her first ball?"
"Patrick, you are certainly mad!" said Marion, unable to help laughing at the almost delirious eagerness of his manner. "Pray consider! I am not in a ball dress! I am not invited! I shall look like a house-maid!——"
"Nonsense! I wish everybody looked half as well! All these reasons, and fifty more, go for nothing. I have set my heart upon it, and you shall not stand in your own light, like the man in the moon. No, Marion! you are to be published immediately under my auspices. You have often expressed a willingness to die for me any day, but that is not necessary just at present. All I ask is that you shall dance for me! Now, fling that bonnet off, shake your little forest of ringlets, and come along. You will pass muster very well without Cinderella's god-mother to make a metamorphosis."
Unable to resist the outburst of her brother's extravagant mirth, yet shrinking and abashed, almost ready to cry with vexation, Marion was unwillingly led, or almost dragged by her laughing persecutor into the drawing-room, where, with a look of naivete, and an aspect lovely in the first blush and freshness of girlhood, she gazed in mute astonishment and almost with dismay at this her first peep into the great world of fashion, wishing for her own part that she could have adopted invisibility, and enjoyed the scene as if she were in a private box at the theatre, for as yet her feelings were "trop pres de la peine pour etre un plaisir."
A bright sunshine streamed into the room, while the gas lamps still dimly glared over the breakfast table, at present surrounded by three or four hot, flushed, dusty-looking young ladies, with exaggerated colors, soiled dresses, torn gloves, withered bouquets, and exceedingly disordered ringlets, falling in dishevelled masses over their naked shoulders. These ladies, assuming forced spirits, and an appearance of over-done gaiety, kept up a rattling, flippant dialogue with about twice or three times the number of gentlemen, some in glittering uniforms, padded and stuffed to the very chin, and others in plain clothes, but all over-heated, over-excited, and over-fatigued, while, in spite of parched lips and blood-shot eyes, they were still endeavoring, with all their might, to be fascinating.