"Bonnie Prince Charlie," repeated Victoria thoughtfully, "perhaps I'll meet him at the ball."
"I shouldn't wonder," replied Miss Pelch significantly, for being a true woman, and dearly loving a romance, she had seen long ago how matters stood between Otterburn and Miss Sheldon.
So they went shopping all that bright afternoon, hunting up tartans, talking learnedly about Cairngorm brooches, and white cockades, and Jacobite songs, and the Lord knows what else.
Ah me, how strangely does Fate deal with our lives. Here was Guy drifting away from his wife day by day, and Angus being drawn nearer and nearer to Victoria. What Sir Guy Errington and Alizon Mostyn were two years before, they were about to become now--would their future be the same?
Who could tell? Fortune, blind and capricious, whirls her wheel round and round, raising and abasing men and women daily, hourly, momentarily, unaware herself, by reason of her bandage, of the good and evil she allots to one and another.
[CHAPTER XXXII.]
WHAT MADE THE BALL SAE FINE?
"Sure this wild fantastic band
Must have come from Fairy-land.
Those who live in History's page,
Step once more upon Life's stage.
All the poet's dreamings bright,
In the flesh appear to-night,
Columbine and Harlequin,
Knight, Crusader, Saracen,
Cleopatra and her Roman,
Herod, Borgia loved of no man,
Antoinette and Louis Seize,
Faust with Mephistopheles,
All beneath the gas-lamps' gleam,
Dance as in some magic dream.
Surely at the break of day,
Will the vision fade away,
And these spirits bright and fair,
Vanish into viewless air."
Mrs. Veilsturm had certainly no reason to complain of lack of popularity, as she looked at her salons thronged with all fashionable London. Her diplomatic behaviour towards Errington for the last few weeks had borne good fruit, having converted foes into friends, and friends into red-hot partizans, therefore everyone came to her fancy dress ball, and this entertainment which signalised her exit from London Society was proving a wonderful success.
Never had she looked so perfectly lovely as she did on this night, when, robed as Cleopatra, she stood near the door receiving her guests. Swathed in diaphanous tissues, broidered with strange figures in gold and silver, with jewels flashing star-like from every portion of her dress, the double crown of Egypt on her lustrous coils of hair, and a trailing mantle of imperial purple silk drooping from her shoulders, she looked like the embodiment of some splendid civilization long since perished from the earth. Truly this woman, with her majestic bearing, her voluptuous form, her rich Eastern beauty, and slow sensuous movements, looked like that antique coquette of the slow-flowing Nile, whose face, fair and deathless, still smiles at us across the long centuries from out the darkness of old Egypt.