"We are late, are we not?" says Florence, entering at this moment; and as Florence never errs, Archibald instantly gives his arm to Lady Chetwoode and takes her down to the carriage. Taffy, who has already opened an animated conversation with Miss Beauchamp on the horrors of square dances, accompanies her; Cyril disappears with Cecilia, and Lilian is left alone in the library with Sir Guy.
Curving her body gracefully, Lilian gathers up with slow nonchalance her long train, and, without bestowing a glance upon Guy, who is silently waiting to escort her to the smaller brougham, goes up to a mirror to take a last lingering survey of her own bewitching image. Then she calmly smooths down her glove, then refastens a bracelet that has come undone, while he, with a bored expression on his face, waits impatiently.
By this, Archibald, who has had ample time to put Lady Chetwoode in her carriage and come all the way back to find a fan forgotten by Miss Beauchamp, re-enters the room.
Lilian beams upon him directly.
"Good Archie," she says, sweetly, "you have returned just in time. There was positively nobody to take poor little me to the brougham." She slips her hand beneath his arm, and walks past Sir Guy composedly, with laughing friendly eyes uplifted to her cousin's.
* * * * * * *
The ball is at its height. The first small hour of morning has sounded. The band is playing dreamily, sweetly; flowers are nodding everywhere, some emitting a dying fragrance, others still fresh and sweet as when first plucked. Afar off the faint splashing of the fountains in the conservatories echoes tremulously, full of cool imaginings, through the warm air. Music and laughter and mirth—real and unreal—are mixed together in one harmonious whole.
Mrs. Steyne has now an unaffected smile upon her face, being assured her ball is an undeniable success, and is allowing herself to be amused by Taffy, who is standing close beside her.
Tom Steyne, who, like Sir Charles Coldstream, is "thirty-three and used up," is in a corner, silently miserable, suffering himself to be flirted at by a gay young thing of forty. He has been making despairing signs to Taffy to come to his assistance, for the past five minutes, which signals of distress that young gentleman basely declines to see.
Every one is busy asking who Mrs. Arlington can be, and, as nobody knows, everybody undertakes to tell his or her neighbor "all about her." And by this time every one is aware she is enormously rich, the widow of an Indian nabob, from whom she was divorced on account of some "fi-fi story, my dear, that is never mentioned now," and that she is ever so many years older than she really looks; "painting is brought to such perfection nowadays!"