The company was not so large as Moreton had imagined. The evening was warm enough to admit of open windows, hence the sound of voices had the more easily reached the outside. Fifteen or twenty persons, mostly young, were scattered throughout a row of elaborate rooms, now made into one by means of folding doors and movable curtains. Mr. Noble, if possible more supple and elastic than ever before, and Mrs. Noble, a tall woman, dressed in elegant taste, greeted Moreton and Reynolds with admirable ease and cordiality. The company was so small that the arrival of two new guests was at once known to all. Moreton glanced about, seeing many faces that he knew, but Reynolds felt himself a stranger to all. His tall, erect figure, bronzed face and graceful bearing attracted the furtive glances of more than one woman present. Moreton, in bowing low over Mrs. Noble's hand, had managed to say to her unheard by any one else: "Mr. Reynolds, my friend here, is a misanthrope and has long been out of society. You will do me the greatest of favors if you will make him the especial object of your gracious attention this evening."
"Certainly," she answered, in a very sweet and low voice, "you shall see how readily I grant your every request, Mr. Moreton. Leave your friend to me."
She kept her promise with scrupulous fidelity, and Reynolds found himself drawn into the midst of a charming circle, where, for a time, all memory of the past few years was drowned in the music of gentle voices.
Miss Cordelia Noble, the banker's daughter, with whom he presently found himself in conversation, was a merry-eyed, ruby-lipped blonde, as supple and ready as her father and at need as dignified and gracious as her mother. She had just returned with her aunt from New York and talked in a most charming way of the opening of the social season there, of the parties, the opera, the art exhibitions and all the other features of importance to fashionable folk in the metropolis. Her voice was a sincere, honest, girlish one, and her sayings were spiced with those little grotesqueries of thought and phrasing which stay with a bright girl for a while after her so-called school days are over. Reynolds had not dreamed of how hungry he really was for even this slight sort of social food, and it was well for him that he did not suspect that, before the dinner was half over, he had become, by force of tacit consent amongst all present, the center of the evening's interest.
Moreton was delighted. He had determined to win his friend back from his hermit's life, no matter what might have been in the first place the secret reason for his retirement to such an outlandish den as the mountaineer's cabin.
"My father has told me that you are to be one of the party going with him to General DeKay's," Miss Noble said to Reynolds.
"Yes," he answered, "and I expect a most delightful time. I hope you are going too?"
"Yes, I could not afford to let such an opportunity pass. I have always greatly desired to see something of field sports. I dote on dogs, and I really believe I should like to shoot, and ride after the hounds in a real fox-chase."
"I am glad you are going," he said. "Your enthusiasm will be a great help when birds are scarce or when we shoot poorly. Will there be other ladies?"
"Oh, quite a number, I dare say. There will be one, at least, the dearest, charmingest woman that ever lived. Mrs. Ransom, a widow, but lovely, fascinating, every thing, indeed, that's sweet and interesting. She was married only a few months when her husband died—he was killed in a duel or something romantic, several years ago—and she looks like a mere girl now."