The Italian was as white as paper, his mustache and brows made spots of ink on it; his eyes were as deep and still as wells in the night. She could hardly doubt that his heart was in a tumult, but he spoke without disaster to his voice, thanking her in a formal phrase. She perceived, from a distinct advantage over him in height, how faultlessly handsome he was in a quiet, unmagnetic way. Never had she seen anything to equal the whiteness of his teeth except her pearls in their black velvet case.
After having paid his duty to her, he remained for some minutes speaking with Mrs. Foss, who appeared as kind, while he appeared as calm and natural, as if time had 125moved back, and they were still at last spring and the beginning of his visits. Of all concerned Aurora was the least collected.
“I can’t help it!” she murmured to Gerald, while the other two were talking together. “I’m all of a tremble. I feel as if I were Brenda; and at the same time I feel as if I were him–or he.”
Mrs. Foss turned to them to say she believed everybody had arrived, and with Giglioli moved away from the door. Gerald asked Mrs. Hawthorne if they should waltz, but she refused, because she ought to be looking after the people who were not dancing and seeing that every one had a good time. She should dance only once that evening, she told him, and it should be with Mr. Foss, who had promised to dance at her party if she would promise to dance with him.
Mr. Foss was seen approaching, and Mrs. Hawthorne smiled and sparkled in anticipation of the jokes they would exchange on her fairy weight and his youthful limberness.
Gerald sent his eyes around the room to see if any one were free whom it would be a sort of duty to ask to dance. He did not look for pleasure from dancing, the less so that Charlie Hunt, on the perpetual jump, and dancing with a perfection almost unmanly, had brought the exercise into temporary discredit with him. Miss Madison was dancing, Miss Seymour was dancing, Leslie was dancing, Brenda–his eyes were unable to find. In a doorway, and not quite as festive in looks as the majority, which gave to the room the effect of an animated flower-bed, he perceived a figure in snuff-brown silk, just in front of which, soberly watching the dancers, was a little girl in a short dress of embroidered white, a blue hair-ribbon and blue enamel locket. 126At once dropping his search for a partner, Gerald went to join this pair, thinking, as he approached, that Lily without her spectacles was beginning to have a look of Brenda,–a Brenda with less beauty, but more originality; more–what could one call it?–geniality, perhaps.
“Oh, Gerald!”–the little girl caught his hand without ceasing for more than a second to watch the ball-room floor,–“I have promised to go home willingly at ten o’clock!” It was spoken in a gentle wail.
“My child,” said Fräulein, “you must begin to prepare, for I fear it cannot be far from ten.”
“Oh, Fräulein, don’t keep talking about it! Please!”
“When you leave this pleasure, Lili, remember, there will be still that other pleasure of the long ride home in the night and the moonlight.”