On the last night came the Christmas dance, when everybody knew everybody else, and the mere hasty dinner beforehand and the ecstasy of dressing after dinner were—Gabrielle thought—delight enough. They had trimmed the house yesterday with holly and greens, and even the Montallens had pushed chairs about with hearty good-will and climbed on ladders to try out chandeliers. Gabrielle told herself a hundred times that she must refuse to dance—she did not really know how to dance well—she was the youngest, anyway, and must make herself Sylvia’s right hand, as hostess.
But in the end, studying herself in the café-au-lait lace gown, which came up almost to the round creamy column of her throat and down almost to her ankles, and which had long, delicately fluted sleeves to her very wrists and was altogether demure to the point of affectation, Gay hoped that she would be asked to dance. Frank du Spain would surely be kind if she did not dance very well.
“There will be a dozen prettier dresses to-night than this one!” she told herself, going slowly downstairs and wishing in a panic that the others had waited for her. Suppose they laughed at this dress—nuns and graduate pupils as old as the Countess might not be supposed to know much about clothes.
However, only a few guests had arrived, shy charming girls and boys from the old mansions in and about Crowchester; the musicians were tuning up deliciously, and the big floor shone inviting and bare. Sylvia, being introduced and introducing with her mother’s and David’s help, had time to say generously, “It’s charming! It’s just right for you, Gay, absolutely suitable!” and Gay’s heart soared and her cheeks warmed; she became the pleasantest and most efficient of hostesses: piloting mothers and guardians to chairs, chatting simply and merrily, and too absorbed in the delightful scene to know or care what was happening to herself.
Aunt Flora was quite magnificent in plum colour; her nearest approach in many years to clothing that was not mourning. The Montallen girls were pretty in pink-and-silver and blue-and-silver gauze. Sylvia was superb in a simple white brocade with a thread of gold—her gold slippers made her look unusually tall—and there was a gold spray of something that looked like thistledown in her hair. Gabrielle was near enough to her sometimes to hear the pleasant sweetness of her replies to neighbourly greetings.
“Indeed I remember the Robinsons! I shall be coming home very soon now, you know, Doctor, and I certainly mean my good neighbours to be part of the new life! Mrs. George, and this is never Betty! Well, Betty——! No, but I shall really be home in June, and then we’ll make some changes here, and see if we can’t make Wastewater a little more comfortable!”
And now and then she turned to David, in a fashion that was sisterly, yet not quite sisterly either, and with her lovely smile.
“David, I wonder if you’d call Maria’s or Daisy’s attention to those candles? They’ll be dripping directly.” Or, “David, will you send Mrs. Wilkinson’s coat upstairs? She doesn’t want to go up——”
Gabrielle was talking to a nice old couple, established expectantly at one of the two card tables that had been provided, when the first dance started. Sylvia was still in the receiving line beside her mother, but David came up to the card table with another bridge-playing elderly couple, and when the four had settled themselves and cut the new pack, he stood smiling before Gay, with his tall, sleek black head a little bent, and his smiling eyes on her, and his arms open.
“Come on, Gay!”