He approached the Grove in that state of placid indifference with which a man generally goes to meet his destiny. He looks back in the after-time, and remembers that equable frame of mind, hoping nothing, expecting nothing, content with his lot in life, and in no wise eager to question or forestall fate—
"Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi,
Finem di dederint."
The Grove was a long, low stuccoed house, built at the beginning of the century, a house spread over a considerable extent of ground. To-night—with lights and flowers, and all the doors and windows open to the summer gloom, and lace draperies where doors had been, and white-gowned girls moving to and fro, and the sound of a Strauss waltz mixing with the voices of the idlers sitting in the hall—Mrs. Mornington's house was as pretty as a fairy palace, and as much unlike itself in its workaday guise.
Mrs. Mornington, in black lace and diamonds, with a black ostrich fan, loomed with commanding bulk on the threshold of the dancing-room. She wanted no steward, no master of the ceremonies to help her. Alone she did it! Mr. Mornington walked about and pretended to be useful; but it was Mrs. Mornington who did everything. She received the guests, she introduced the few strange young men to the many local young ladies. As for the local young men, whom she had seen grow up from sailor suits and mud-pies to pink coats which marked them members of the South Sarum Hunt, her dominion over these was absolute. She drove them about with threatening movements of her large black fan. She would not allow them rest or respite, would not let them hang together in corners to discuss the hunters they were summering, or the hunters they were thinking of buying, or the probable changes in the management of the kennels, or any other subject dear to the minds of rustic youth.
"You have come here to dance, Billy Walcott, and not to talk of those wretched old screws of yours," said Mrs. Mornington. "You can have that all out in the saddle-room to-morrow when you are smoking with your grooms. Let me look at your programme, Sidney. Not half full, I declare. Now go over to Miss Rycroft this instant, and engage her for the next waltz."
"Come now, Mrs. Mornington, that's rather too rough on me. A man mayn't marry his grandmother; and surely there's some kind of law to forbid his dancing with a woman who looks like his great-aunt."
"Sidney, love, to oblige me. The dear old thing has gone to the expense of a new frock——"
"She might have bought a little more stuff while she was about it," murmured the youth.
"On purpose for my dance, and somebody must give her a waltz. Come, boys, who shall it be?"