“Well, it was a pretty sight,” exclaimed Tinkerly, enthusiastically; “but I don’t think I ever saw such a mort of plain women in my life.”
“Lor, Mr. Tinkerly,” cried Susan, with a shocked air. “Why, look at our young mistress, and at Miss Crowther, and Miss Spenthrop from Truro, and Mrs. Pencarrow, and Lady Chanderville.”
“Well, I don’t say they’re all ugly. Some of ’em are handsome enough, and there’s plenty of thorough-breds among ’em, but there’s a sight of plain-headed ones. There’s quite as much beauty in your spear as there is among the county folks, Miss Susan. I’ll answer for that.”
The night was waning. Isola had ordered her carriage for half-past two: but three o’clock had struck from the church tower of Lostwithiel, and the dance was still at its height—at its best, the dancers said, now that the sensual attractions of the supper-room drew off a good many people, and left the floor so much clearer than before supper, when bulky middle-aged gentlemen, talking to the matrons seated upon the divan, had projected their ponderous persons into the orbit of the waltzers.
Isola and Lostwithiel had danced only two waltzes, but since two o’clock they had sat out several dances, Mrs. Disney having cancelled all her engagements after that hour by declaring that she would dance no more.
“I am dreadfully tired,” she told her partners piteously, and her pallor gave force to the assertion. “Please get some one else for our dance, Captain Morshead,” and so on, and so on, to half a dozen disappointed suitors.
Perhaps some of those who happened to be experienced in such complications may have divined which way the wind blew, for no one offered to sit out the promised dances, and Isola and Lostwithiel were left pretty much to themselves among the palms and orange-trees in the ante-room. They were not unobserved, however; and among the eyes which marked them with no friendly notice were the fine, steel-blue eyes of Miss Crowther.
“Is that a flirtation?” she asked Captain Morshead, glancing in the direction of the ante-room where those two were sitting, as she and Isola’s cast-off partner waltzed past the muslin-draped doorway.
“They seem rather fond of talking to each other, don’t they? Who was she? She’s uncommonly pretty.”