A band of the Dutch Guards furnished music on the lawn, and there dancing was in progress in the bright sunshine of the summer afternoon; and, in the fashion of the time, many of the guests were arrayed in what they deemed the costume of Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses.
People danced early in the evenings of the eighteenth century, and were abed about the time their descendants now begin to dress for a ball. Ices were unknown; no wine was dispensed, but the liveried servants of the Heervan Otterbeck regaled his guests on coffee, green tea, orange tea, and many kinds of cakes and confectionery in the intervals of the dancing, in which Dolores (all innocent and unaware of the plots in progress against her peace, even her honour and liberty—one of them born of avarice, wounded vanity, and foiled desire) indulged joyously and with all her heart.
For the information of the ladies of the present day we shall detail the dress worn by Dolores on that evening as described in the Hague Gazette, and they may imagine how charming she looked:
'Her body and train were silver tissue, with a broad silver fringe; her petticoat was white satin covered with the richest crape, embroidered with silver, fastened up with bunches of silver roses, tassels, and cords. Her pocket-holes were blonde, her stockings were blue, clocked with silver, and her hair was twisted and plaited in the most beautiful manner around a diamond comb.'
Seated under a tree, flushed with a recent dance, she was alternately playing with her fan and silver pomander ball, with a crowd of admirers about her, and looking alike pure and bright, with 'a skin as though she had been dieted on milk and roses.'
'No wonder it is, perhaps, that Lewie loves me,' thought the girl, as she looked at the reflection of her own sweet face in a little bit of oval mirror in the back of her huge Dutch fan; 'I am pretty!'
She might have said 'lovely,' and more than lovely; and then she smiled consciously at her own vanity.
Under the genial influence of her surroundings the heart of the girl was full of happiness, and had but one regret that Lewie Baronald was not there. Yet, she thought, 'to-morrow I shall see him—to-morrow be with my darling, who at this moment is thinking of me.'
And amid the brilliance of the scene, so rich in the variety of colour and costume, the strains of the music and beauty of the old Dutch pleasure-grounds, she almost longed to be alone, with the grass, the birds, the insects, and the flowers—alone in the sweet summer evening with the perfume of the roses, the jasmine, and the glorious honeysuckle around her.
On one hand, about a mile distant, was the Hague, with all its Gothic spires and pointed gables; on the other spread the landscape so usual in that country of cheese and butter—church-towers and wind-mills, bright farmhouses, long rows of willow-trees, their green foliage ruffling up white in the passing breeze; the grassy dykes and embankments, a long continuity of horizontal lines, which seemed so tame and insipid to the mountaineers of the Scots Brigade, and to all but the Dutch themselves.