"Oh, it's such a dream, and you are so lovely, Lady Emily, and it doesn't seem real. So it's very easy to play, you know."
"I should make them stop talking, but they came for that, you know. And you are playing so well, it's too pretty an interlude. Helen didn't tell me that you could play like this."
"And my new master makes me believe I can't play a note," said Mabel. "I shall tell him he is quite wrong, because you said so."
Aunt Katharine's words came to her mind--playing at one end of the country no better than the other! Ah, well, it was newer, fresher, or something--taking it either way!
Of course it came to an end. The girls slipped out with Adelaide Maud and found the long corridor with the white room containing their wraps and two attentive maids. They were covered up in their cloaks, and watched one or two leave before them, as they stood looking down on them from the staircase.
"Nobody will miss us," said Adelaide Maud. "They are 'going on,' you know."
There was something rather sad in her voice.
"They all go on to something or somebody, even that dear old Earl Knuptford, he will pick you at the same place next year that he found you at to-night, and say, 'Hey, what,' and never think that both he and you have dropped twelve months out of your lives. It's different at Ridgetown, isn't it?"
"Yes, there's nothing to go on to at Ridgetown, is there?" said Jean grimly. "And nobody to forget or to say, 'Hey, what,' even if they had never met you before."
Her world was full of shining diplomats and she had chatted with an earl.