She felt herself flush. "I did not know that you were such a German scholar," she replied, sarcastically. "Yes! my name is Erdmuth Dorothea. I was called so after--after some one you most likely know nothing about, Countess Zinzendorf. She was famous enough, though,--" she paused, feeling savagely desirous of snubbing him--"But I daresay you never even happened to hear of Jean Ziska, Mr. Carlyon?"
He smiled suddenly, broadly. "Jean Ziska!" he echoed. "Rather! We had a pony called Ziska at home--a Hungarian--used to eat thistles like a donkey!"
He stopped to laugh, and she was about to turn and rend him, when he continued, half apologetically, "Of course I have--only the name, you see, brought back such jolly old times. Ziska was the beggar who had his skin made into a drum when he was dead. I don't expect it's true, but it's a fine tale; the drum ecclesiastic with a vengeance, and no mistake!"
"Oh! but it is," interrupted the girl, forgetting her annoyance in her eagerness. "My grandfather--we are really Moravians, you see, and our name should be Schaeffer,--saw it when he was a child. He used to tell me that people said if it was beaten, everybody must--"
But Lance's attention had wandered. He was looking at her signature with a curious, almost wistful smile. "Erdmuth!" he repeated thoughtfully; then turned to her. "I say! you really ought to come to the ball with that name--do!"
He was simply, she told herself, the most distractingly irrelevant, yet at the same time the most appallingly direct, person she had ever come across. "Really, Mr. Carlyon," she began, with such heat that the aide-de-camp, returning, stared; until Lance coolly asked him if he didn't think Miss Shepherd very unkind not to come to the Bachelor's Ball? Whereupon he, having by this time had enough of laces and ribbons, and begun to recognize a distinct charm in the glistening coils of hair, half-hidden by a wide hat, promptly asked her for the pleasure of a dance.
Erda looked from one to the other aghast, and to her own intense surprise fell back upon the woman's all-embracing excuse, "I--I really haven't a dress." It seemed the simplest and easiest.
"Oh! anything does for a fancy ball," persisted Lance, argumentatively, as he followed her out. "A tailor in the bazaar would run you up a Greek dress in no time, and it would do awfully well. All white, don't you know--" his voice slackened and grew soft, as if he saw what he described, and the sight made him glad--"all straight folds with a little edge of red-gold like--" he paused, then went on boldly--"like the sunshine on your hair. And red-gold bracelets high up on your arms--and a red-gold apple in your hand--the World's Desire--" He stopped abruptly, with a quick catch in his breath, startled at his own words.
And she, too, held her breath before the vision; for she saw it also. Saw herself, as he had described her, and the glamour of it, the desire of it, assailed her, body and soul.
Yet she made a desperate, a passionately resentful effort to ignore them. "I didn't know you were so well up in chiffons, Mr. Carlyon," she said, with a forced laugh. "Did you ever think of setting up a milliner's shop? One is badly needed in Eshwara."