“Thank you. Everybody tells me that,” said Odalite, smiling.
Miss Grandiere was dressed in a rich, black silk, with a white lace fichu and white lace cuffs, and her black hair was plaited and wound into a roll at the top of her head and fastened with a very high back comb. Her front hair was divided in the middle and wound into curls, two down each temple.
Miss Sibby wore a plain black silk and a book-muslin cap, with a full lace border and white satin bows and strings.
The two little Elk girls, aged ten and twelve, were slender, dark-eyed, dark-haired, red-cheeked lasses, dressed in the most brilliant of Scotch plaids, with neatly crimped muslin ruffles around their throats and wrists and amber necklaces and bracelets.
But Rosemary Hedge’s dress was the quaintest costume that the law—of society—allowed. It was a sage-green velvet, made out of one of Miss Grandiere’s own old-fashioned gowns, and decorated all around the bottom of the skirt, the belt, the sleeves and the neck with crimson cypress vines, blue forget-me-nots and yellow crocuses, worked by Miss Grandiere’s own fingers.
Rosemary wore no trinkets, her only ornament being her blue-black hair curled in ringlets all around her pretty head.
When the visitors were ready to go down, Odalite conducted them to the drawing room, where now, at one end, the negro musicians were seated on chairs raised upon a long, broad bench, and were beginning to tune their instruments, preparatory to playing up an inspiring quadrille tune.
As soon as Mrs. Anglesea saw the newcomers, she made a dash across the room at them, and accosted them with effusion.
“So glad to see you all! And there’s my gay, young sailor lad! Mind you, Roland Bayard, I won’t take you away from the young uns all the time, because it is their party, but you must manage to give me half a dozen dances during the evening,” she said.
“With the greatest pleasure, Mrs. Anglesea,” said the gallant tar, “though I didn’t know that you danced.”