Rose looked at her appraisingly. "No, perhaps you don't need it after all, not anyhow when you blush like that. You have quite a pretty blush, Dinah, and you are wise to make the most of it. Are you ready, dear? Then we will go down."
She rustled forth with Dinah beside her, shedding a soft fragrance of some Indian scent as she moved that somehow filled Dinah with indignation, like a resentful butterfly in search of more wholesome delights.
Eustace was in the hall when they descended. He came forward to meet his fiancée, and her heart throbbed fast and hard at the sight of him. But his manner was so strictly casual and impersonal that her agitation speedily passed, and by the time they were seated side by side at dinner—for the last time in their lives, as the Colonel jocosely remarked—she could not feel that she had ever been anything nearer to him than a passing acquaintance.
She was shy and very quiet. The hubbub of voices, the brilliance of it all, overwhelmed her. If Scott had been on her other side, she would have been much happier, but he was far away making courteous conversation for the benefit of a deaf old lady whom no one else made the smallest effort to entertain.
Suddenly Sir Eustace disengaged himself from the general talk and turned to her. "Dinah!" he said.
Her heart leapt again. She glanced at him and caught the gleam of the hunter in those rapier-bright eyes of his.
He leaned slightly towards her, his smile like a shining cloak, hiding his soul. "Daphne," he said, and his voice came to her subtle, caressing, commanding, through the gay tumult all about them, "there is going to be dancing presently. Did you hear?"
"Yes," she whispered with lowered eyes.
"You will dance with only one to-night," he said. "That is understood, is it?"
"Yes," she whispered again.