Lucy Kemp was thoroughly enjoying herself. Had she cared to do so she could have danced every dance twice over—in fact, she would willingly have spared some of the attention she received from the young men of the neighbourhood, the sons of the local squires and clergy, who all liked her, and were glad to dance with her.
Oliver seemed to have gone back to his old self. He and Lucy—though standing close to Mrs. Boringdon and an old lady with whom she had settled down for a long talk—were practically alone. Both felt as if they were meeting for the first time after a long accidental absence, and so had much to say to one another. Mrs. Rebell's name was not once mentioned,—why indeed should it have been? so Lucy asked herself when, later, during the days that followed, she went over every word of that long, intermittent conversation. Their talk was all about Oliver's own affairs—especially they discussed in all its bearings that important by-election which was surely coming on.
Then something occurred which completed, and, as it were, rounded off Lucy's joy and contentment. James Berwick made his way across the vast room, now full of spinning couples, to the recess where they were both standing, and at once began talking earnestly to Oliver, tacitly including the girl by his side in the conversation. At the end of the eager, intimate discussion, he turned abruptly to Lucy and asked her to dance with him, and she, flushing with pleasure, perceived that Boringdon was greatly pleased and rather surprised by his friend's action. As for herself, she felt far more flattered than when the same civility—for so Lucy, in her humility, considered it—had been paid her earlier in the evening by the hero of the day, shy Lord Pendragon himself. That Berwick could not dance at all well made the compliment all the greater!
And Barbara Rebell? Barbara was not enjoying herself at all. It has become a truism to say that solitude in a crowd is the most trying of all ordeals. In one sense, Mrs. Rebell was not left a moment solitary, for both the Duke and the Duchess took especial pains to introduce her to those notabilities of the neighbourhood whom they knew Madame Sampiero was so eager, so pathetically anxious, that her god-daughter should know and impress favourably. But, as the evening went on, she felt more and more that she had no real link with these happy people about her. Even when listening, with moved heart, to old Mr. Daman's reminiscences of those far-off days at St. Germains, when his coming had meant a delightful holiday for the lonely little English girl to whom he was so kind, she felt curiously, nay horribly, alone.
With a feeling of bewildered pain, she gradually became aware that James Berwick, without appearing to do so, avoided finding himself in her company. She saw him talking eagerly, first to this woman, and then to that; at one moment bending over the armchair of an important dowager, and then dancing—yes, actually dancing—with Lucy Kemp. She also could not help observing that he was very often in the neighbourhood of the woman who, Barbara acknowledged to herself, was the beauty of the ball, a certain Mrs. Marshall, whose radiant fairness was enhanced by a black tulle and jet gown, and who was—so Mr. Daman informed her with a chuckle—but a newly-made widow. And in truth something seemed to hold Berwick, as if by magic, to the floor of the ball-room. He did not wander off, as did everybody else, either alone or in company, to any of the pretty side-rooms which had been arranged for sitting out, or into the long, book-lined gallery; and yet Mrs. Rebell had now and again caught his glance fixed on her, his eyes studiously emptied of expression. To avoid that strange alien gaze, she had retreated more than once into the gallery, but the ball-room seemed to draw her also, or else her companions—the shadow-like men and women who seemed to be brought up to her in an endless procession, and to whom she heard herself saying she hardly knew what—were in a conspiracy to force her back to where she could not help seeing Berwick.
Oh! how ardently Barbara wished that the evening would draw to a close. It was good to remember that Mrs. Boringdon and Lucy had both expressed a strong desire to leave early. Soon her martyrdom, for so in truth it was, would cease, and so also, with this experience—this sudden light thrown down into the depths of her own heart—would cease her intimacy with James Berwick.
The anguish she felt herself enduring frightened her. What right had this man, who was after all but a friend and a friend of short standing, to make her feel this intolerable pain, and, what was to such a nature as hers more bitter, such humiliation? There assailed her that instinct of self-preservation which makes itself felt in certain natures, even in the rarefied atmosphere of exalted passion. She must, after to-night, save herself from the possible repetition of such feelings as those which now possessed her. She told herself that those past afternoons and evenings of close, often wordless, communion and intimacy yet gave her no lien on James Berwick's heart, no right even to his attention.
Sitting there, with Mr. Daman babbling in her ear, mocking ghosts, evil memories, crowded round poor Barbara. She remembered the first time—the only time that really mattered—when she had been told, she herself would never have suspected or discovered it, of Pedro Rebell's infidelity, of his connection with one of their own coloured people, and the passion of outraged pride and disgust which had possessed her, wedded to a sense of awful loneliness. Even to herself it seemed amazing that she should be suffering now much as she had suffered during that short West Indian night five years ago. Nay, she was now suffering more, for then there had not been added to her other miseries that feeling of soreness and sense of personal loss.