"What are you laughing at so loudly, papa?" asked Miss Hirsch, pulled up in the next round by her parent's laughter. "I'm sure he must be boring you terribly, Mrs. Cruttenden. And there is Mr. Leveson, papa, just dying to be introduced--he told me so just now--do go and fetch him. You'll find him awfully amusing, Mrs. Cruttenden, he has seen so much life."
He had seen too much for Aura. She came out from the conservatory white with anger. By this time half the men in the room were looking at her, and it was no longer any question of being alone. She was beginning to feel frightened, she looked vainly for Ted, but he having seen her, as he phrased it self-complacently, "well-started," was amusing himself. So, in the crush of smiling, flattering faces, she saw Ned Blackborough's, and caught almost convulsively at his arm, and his quiet decorous claim.
"Our dance, I think."
"Oh! Ned!" she said hurriedly, "do let us go to some quiet place where we can get away from everybody."
The suggestion was but too welcome. Free for a time from his duties as host, he cast all prudence to the winds. The sort of thing that had been going on was all very well, but it must end in the inevitable way. When she was happy, he might have been a fool. Now, he would not be one. It was not as if he would be doing Ted any real harm. If he was free of her he would be free to marry and have sons to inherit his money, he could even marry Miss Hirsch!
The library whither they escaped looked snug and comfortable, all untouched by the babel without. The reading lamp by the blazing fire; Ned's book as he had left it.
"This is nice," she said with a little shiver of satisfaction, and taking up the book crouched down in her usual fashion by the fire to see what it was.
Ned's pulses were bounding. It was all he could do to keep his voice steady.
"You oughtn't to do Cinderella in that lovely gown!" he said.
Aura looked at him critically. "I feel like Cinderella," she said. "I believe I want to go home before twelve; and I don't think I like the gown; it makes me something I never was before."