Yet, as a matter of fact, he hadn’t read one page. From where he sat he could look through the window, through the long room where the dancing was going on, into the smaller room beyond, where sat his two sisters, Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Milner, and with them Miss La Chêne. He could look, and he did look.
Elaine was a pretty girl, and she had collected two or three rather pretty young things and a proper number of young fellows. All in all, they were a cheerful, well dressed, well mannered lot of young people, and the spectacle of their harmless merriment might well have brought a smile to the lips of any observer; yet Mandeville did not smile.
He was looking at Miss La Chêne, sitting there with the two ladies, silent, decorous, and patient, in her plain little dark silk dress, the very model of a companion. Only her enormous black eyes moved restlessly, following the dancers with a look which Mandeville could hardly endure.
“Poor little thing!” he said to himself. “Poor little thing! It’s a confounded shame!”
There wasn’t a girl there half so pretty as she, not a girl with anything like her style, her charm, her grace. She was beyond measure superior to all of them, yet there she had to sit, looking on.
“And I let her in for this!” young Ryder thought. “She has no business being a companion, anyhow. By George, if she had half a chance!”
And, with a rather touching naïveté, he thought he could remedy all this, could notably assist and hearten the poor little thing. He rose, put down his book, entered the house, threaded his way among the[Pg 198] dancers, and presently stood beside Miss La Chêne’s chair. She raised those big eyes to his face with a startled look.
“We’ll try a dance, eh?” said the lordly, blond-crested youth.
For a moment she hesitated. She knew she shouldn’t accept. Elaine wouldn’t like it, Elaine’s mother wouldn’t like it, Mrs. Robinson wouldn’t like it; but Miss La Chêne couldn’t resist. With another glance at Mandeville she rose, he put his arm about her, and off they went.
And, as he put it, they stopped the show. He was a wonderful dancer, and she was incomparable. They danced with the curious gravity of professionals. They did not smile, they did not speak, except when he gave a low, brief order for a change of step.