"You mean?" say Joyce a little faintly.
"Oh, you haven't heard. I am so annoyed myself about it, that I fancied everybody knew. You know I hoped that you would have been good enough to give me the first dance, but when Isabel asked me to dance it with that dreadful daughter of Lady Dunscombe's, what could I do, now I ask you?" appealing to her with hands and eyes. "What could I do?"
"Obey, of course," says she with an effort, but a successful one. "You must hurry too, if you want to secure Miss Dunscombe."
"Ah; what a misfortune it is to be the brother of one's hostess," says he, with a sort of comic despair. His eyes are centred on her face, reading her carefully, and with much secret satisfaction;—rapid as that slight change upon her face had been, he had seen and noted it.
"It couldn't possibly be a misfortune to be Lady Baltimore's brother," says she smiling. "On the contrary, you are to be congratulated."
"Not just at this moment surely!"
"At this or any other moment. Ah!"—as they enter the ballroom. "The room is already fuller than I thought. Engaged, Mr. Blake?" to Lord Blake's eldest son. "No, not for this. Yes, with pleasure."
She makes a little charming inclination of her head to Beauclerk, and laying her hand on Mr. Blake's arm, moves away with him to where a set is already forming at the end of the room. It is without enthusiasm she takes her place with Dysart and one of the O'Donovan girls as vis-à-vis, and prepares to march, retreat, twist and turn with the best of them.
"A dull old game," she is irreverently terming the quadrilles—that massing together of inelegant movements so dear to the bucolic mind—that saving clause for the old maids and the wall-flowers; when a little change of position shows her the double quartette on the right hand side of the magnificent ballroom.
She had been half through an unimportant remark to Mr. Blake, but she stops short now and forgets to finish it. Her color comes and goes. The sides are now prancing through their performance, and she and her partner are standing still. Perhaps—perhaps she was mistaken; with all these swaying idiots on every side of her she might well have mixed up one man's partner with another; and Miss Dunscombe (she had caught a glimpse of her awhile ago) was surely in that set on the right hand side.