Miss Pomeroy saw him coming, and turning her face away, she produced a pretty, well-turned comment on the arrangement of the rooms for the benefit of her cavalier. The next instant Julian stood beside her.
“Don’t turn your back on me,” he implored gaily. “No fellow ever had such hard luck as I’ve had to-night. Be a great deal kinder to me than I seem to deserve, and forgive me. Please!”
Miss Pomeroy turned her head and looked at him with a serene calm on her pretty face, which seemed to relegate him to a place among inferior objects entirely indifferent to her. Her voice was perhaps a little too indifferent.
“Oh, Mr. Romayne!” she said. “You’ve actually appeared!”
“I have,” he said. “At last! There’s a poor fellow I’ve seen a good deal of—not one of the regular set, you know, but a thoroughly unlucky chap, always in the wars. He’s just off to try his luck on the other side of the world, and I met him this evening most awfully blue and lonely—he hasn’t a friend in the world. Of course I had to try and cheer him up a bit, and—there, I couldn’t leave him, don’t you know. I packed him into the mail train at last, and bolted here as fast as wheels could bring me.”
Something of the blank serenity of Miss Pomeroy’s face gave way. She lifted the feather fan that hung at her girdle and began to ruffle the feathers lightly against her other hand with lowered eyelids.
“I don’t think I should have troubled to hurry as it was so late!” she said, and there was a touch of reproach and resentment in her voice. Her cavalier had drifted away by this time, and in the midst of the constantly moving stream of people she and Julian were practically alone. Julian answered her quickly with eager significance.
“You would—in my place!” he said. “You would if you had had the hope of even one of the dances to which you had been looking forward—well, I won’t say how, or for how long. Was it altogether a vain hope? Am I quite too late?”
“You are very late!” was the answer; but the tone was distant and indifferent no longer; and as the sound of the violins rose softly and invitingly once more from the other room a quick question from Julian received a soft affirmative in reply, and he led her triumphantly towards the music.
The room was not too full. The garden, the supper, the “show”—as the guests called it amongst themselves—as a whole, prevented any overcrowding in the dancing-room. But dancing among such cunningly arranged accessories was by no means a commonplace business. The unfamiliar picturesqueness of the room, with its softly scented air, the wonderful effects of colour and light, and above all a certain wild passion and sweetness about the music, was not wholly without effect even on the jaded, torpid receptivity of men and women of the world.