CHAPTER X.
"Nature has sometimes made a fool."
The fiddles are squeaking, the 'cellos are groaning, the man with the cornet is making a most ungodly row. As yet, the band have the ballroom all to themselves, and are certainly making the most of their time. Such unearthly noises rarely, if ever, have been heard in it before. Why they couldn't have tuned their instruments before coming is a question that fills the butler's mind with wrath, but perhaps the long journey down from Dublin would have untuned them all again, and left the players of them disconsolate.
The dismal sounds penetrate into the rooms right and left of the ballroom, but fail to kill the melancholy sweetness of the dripping fountains or the perfume of the hundred flowers that gave their sleeping draughts to all those who chose to come and inhale them. Mild draughts that please the senses without stealing them.
The sounds even penetrate to the library, where Joyce is standing before the low fire, that even in this July evening burns upon the hearth, fastening her long gloves. She had got down before the others, and now, finding the room empty, half wishes herself back again upstairs. But she is so young, so full of a fresh delight in all the gaiety around her, that she had hurried over her dressing, and, with the first dismal sounds of the toning, had turned her steps its way.
The library seems cold to her, bare, unfriendly. Had she expected to meet somebody there before her—somebody who had promised to get a fresh tie in a hurry, but who had possibly forgotten all about it in the joy of an after-dinner cigar?
It seems a long time since that first day when she had been startled by his sudden reappearance at the Court. A long, long time. Soon this last visit of hers to the Court must come to an end. The Baltimores will be going abroad in a fortnight or so—and he with them. The summer is waning—dreary autumn coming. He will go—and——
A sense of dissatisfaction sits heavily on her, toning down to rather a too cruel a degree the bright expectancy of her face. He had said he would come, and now——She drums in a heavy-hearted listless fashion on the table with the tips of her pale gloves, and noticing, half consciously in so doing, that they have not been sufficiently drawn up her arm, mechanically fits them closer to the taper fingers.
Certainly he had said he would be here. "Early you know. Before the others can get down." A quick frown grows upon her forehead, and now that the fingers are quiet, the little foot begins to beat a tattoo upon the ground. Leaning against the table in a graceful attitude, with the lamplight streaming on her pretty white frock, she gives a loose rein to her thoughts.