"My future daughter-in-law, Miss Athelstan."
It may have been fancy, but I thought I caught flashes of surprise in their eyes. One lady—Lady Tilchester—the great magnate in the neighborhood, spoke to me. She had gracious, beautiful manners, and although she could not know anything about me or my history, there seemed to be sympathy in her big, brown eyes.
"This is your first ball Mrs. Gurrage tells me," she said, kindly. "I hope you will enjoy it. I must introduce some of my party to you. Ah, they are dancing now; I must find them presently."
During this Augustus fidgeted. He kept touching my arm, half in an outburst of affection and half to keep my attention from wandering from him. He blustered politenesses to Lady Tilchester, who smiled vacantly while she was attending to something else. Then my fiancé suggested that we should dance. I agreed; it would be an opportunity to get rid of my cauliflower bouquet, which I flung viciously into a chair, and off we started.
Augustus dances vilely. When he was not bumping me against other valseurs he was treading on my toes—a jig or a funeral-march might have been playing instead of a valse, for all the time of it mattered to him.
"I never dance fast, I hate it," he said, in the first pause; "don't you?"
"No! I like it—at least, I mean, I like to do whatever the music is doing," I answered, trying to keep my voice from showing the anger and disgust I felt.
"Darling!" was all he muttered, as he seized me round the waist again.
"Oh! it makes me giddy," I said, which was a lie I am ashamed of. "Let us stop."
It was from Scylla to Charybdis, for I was led to one of the sitting-out places. So stupidly ignorant was I in the ways of balls that I did not realize that we should be practically alone, or I would have remained glued to the ballroom. However, before I knew it we were seated on a sofa behind a screen, in a subdued light.