THE ALLISONS' BALL AND THAT WHICH FOLLOWED IT
As I have written, save for Huey MacGrath, we should have been away from Scotland at the time of the Allisons' ball, and by this absence should have missed the visit of the Duke of Borthwicke concerning the Light-House Commission, which fell at the same time.
His grace's letter to Nancy just previous to this return was filled with a droll cataloguing of all the good deeds which he was doing, in the manner of an exact invoice.
"I hope you will not be forgetting any of these, not even the smallest," he concluded this epistle, "for it is because of these I am going to ask you a favor, a great favor—the greatest favor on earth."
For the two or three days before this merrymaking Nancy was in a strange mood, of which I could make nothing, her gaiety being more pronouncedly gay, and her silences continuing longer than I had ever noted them. She spent much of her time in her own room, trying on and having refitted a wonderful gown which Lunardi had sent up from London by special carrier the week before. I knew women well enough to understand that she wished to outshine even herself in this first meeting with Danvers since his marriage, perhaps to show him that she wore no willows on his account, or perchance to make him a bit regretful of what he had missed.
On the evening of the rout the duke dined at Stair, purposing to go with us to the ball and to be set down at his tavern on our way home. Nancy, in a short-waisted black frock, sat with us at the meal, merry as a child, chattering of the coming party and her "braw new claes," as she called them, as if there were no trouble in the world, or as if she were exempted from it, if it existed. She spent an hour or more upon her dressing, returning to us a lovelier, fairer, more radiant Nancy than she had ever seemed before, even to my infatuated fatherly eyes. Nor was this thought mine alone, for I saw the start of surprise which Montrose gave at sight of her, and heard the sudden breath he drew as she came toward us from the hall.
Her skin, always noticeably white and transparent, seemed this night to have a certain luminous quality. Her cheeks were flushed, her gray eyes shone mistily under the black lashes and blacker brows, and the scarlet outline of her lips was marked as in a drawing. She wore a gown of palest rose, covered with yellow cob-webby lace, which was her grandmother's, the satin of the gown showing through the film which covered it like "morning light through mist," as I told her, to be poetical. The frock was low and sleeveless, the bodice of it ablaze with gems, and there was another thing I noticed with surprise and admiration. She wore her hair high, though loose and soft about the brows, and in the coil of it a large comb set with many precious stones. This jewel, originally designed to wear at the back of the head, she had turned forward, making a coronet over her brows, beautiful in itself, becoming in the extreme, and I noted that his Grace of Borthwicke let his eyes rest upon it with a peculiar pleasure.
He rose at her entrance and bowed very low, with pretended servility, resuming his usual manner before he said, with significance:
"The coronet becomes you, Nancy Stair."
And she looked back at him, with a low laugh, with no self-consciousness in it, however, as she answered: