"My first ball, madam," remarked the senator, scenting difficulty in the breeze, and confronting it boldly. "But for my friend, Mrs. Amory, I am afraid I should not be here. I begin to feel indebted to her already."
"It promises very well," said Bertha. "I never saw the room gayer. How pretty the decorations are!"
They passed on to make room for others, leaving the estimable ladies behind them pale with excitement, and more demoralized than they would have been willing to admit.
"What does it mean?" they asked one another. "They appear to be the best of friends! What are we to understand?"
There was one kindly matron at the end of the line who looked after the pair with an expression of sympathy which was rather at variance with the severity of the rôle she had been called upon to enact.
"It appears," she said, "as if the whole story might be a fabrication, and the senator determined to prove it so. I hope with all my heart he will."
By the time they reached their seats the news of their arrival had made the circle of the room. Bertha herself, while she had listened with a smile to her escort's remarks, had seen amazement and recognition flash out upon a score of faces; but she had preserved her smile intact, and still wore it when she took her chair. She spoke to Blundel, waving her fan with a soft, even motion.
"We have run the gauntlet," she said, "and we have chosen a good position. Almost everybody in the room has seen us; almost every one in the room is looking at us."
"Let them look!" he answered. "I have no objection to it."
"Ah, they will look!" she returned. "And we came to be—to be looked at. And it is very good of you to have no objections. Do I seem perfectly at ease? I hope so—though I am entirely well aware that at least a hundred people are discussing me. Is the expression of my eyes good—careless enough?"