Jeannie leant over the banisters; she had already gone up some six stairs.
"But by all means," she said. "I—I too have missed our talks. Things have gone wrong a little? Let us try after dinner to put them straight. We shall find an opportunity."
"Thanks," he said; and it was not only the word that thanked her.
Jeannie's maid must have been a first-rate hand at throwing, if by that simple process she produced in a quarter of an hour that exquisite and finished piece of apparelling which appeared at half-past eight. True, it was Jeannie who wore the jewels and the dress, and her hair it was that rose in those black billows above her shapely head; and the dress, it may be said, was worthy of the wearer. Still, if this was to be arrived at by throwing things, the maid, it was generally felt, must be a competent hurler.
It so happened that everybody was extremely punctual that night, and Jeannie, though quite sufficiently so, the last to appear. Lady Nottingham was even just beginning to allude to the necessary quarter of an hour when she came in.
Lord Lindfield saw her first; he was talking to Daisy. But he turned from her in the middle of a sentence, and said,—
"By Gad!"
It might have been by Gad, but it was by Worth. Four shades of grey, and pearls. Mrs. Beaumont distinctly thought that this was not the sort of dress to dash into the faces of a quiet country party. It was like letting off rockets at a five o'clock tea. Only a woman could dissect the enormity of it; men just stared.
"I know I am not more than one minute late," she said. "Lord Lindfield, Alice has told me to lead you to your doom, which is to take me in.—Alice, they have told us, haven't they?"