She disengages herself with sudden abruptness from his clasp.
"I am tired of dancing," she says. "I detest redowas. And be kind enough to keep your odious point-blank compliments for the 'prettiest and best-dressed lady in the room.' I don't appreciate them!"
Is it jealousy? Charley wonders, complacently. He sits down beside her, and tries to coax her into good humor, but she is not to be coaxed. In ten minutes another partner comes up and claims her, and she goes. The pretty, dark girl in white, is greatly admired, and has no lack of partners. For Mr. Stuart he dances no more—he leans against a piller, pulls his mustache; and looks placid and handsome. He isn't devoted to dancing, as a rule he objects to it on principle, as so much physical exertion for very little result; he has only fatigued himself to-night as a matter of abstract duty. He stands and watches Edith dance—this country girl has the lithe, willowy grace of a Bayadere, and she is laughing now, and looking very bright and animated. It dawns upon him, that she is by all odds the prettiest girl in the house, and that slowly but surely, for the hundred-and-fiftieth time in his life, he is falling in love.
"But I might have known it," Mr. Stuart thinks, gravely; "brown beauties always did play the dickens with me. I thought that at five-and-twenty I had outgrown all that sort of youthful rubbish, and here I am on the brink of the pit again. Falling in love in the present, involves matrimony in the future, and matrimony has been the horror of my life since I was four years old. And then the governor wouldn't hear of it. I'm to be handed over to the first 'daughter of a hundred earls' across in England, who is willing to exchange a tarnished British coronet for a Yankee million or two of dollars."
It is Trixy who is dancing with the baronet now—Trixy who descends to supper on the baronet's arm. She dances with him once again after supper; then he returns to Edith.
So the hours go on, and the April morning is growing gray. Once, Edith finds herself seated beside genial Lady Helena, who talks to her in a motherly way, that takes all her heart captive at once. Sir Victor leans over his aunt's chair, listening with a smile, and not saying much himself. His aunt's eyes follow him everywhere, her voice takes a deeper tenderness when she speaks to him. It is easy to see she loves him with almost more than a mother's love.
A little longer and it is all over. Carriage after carriage rolls away—Sir Victor and Lady Helena shake hands with this pretty, well-bred Miss Darrell, and go too. She sees Charley linger to the last moment, by fascinating Mrs. Featherbrain, whispering the usual inanity, in her pretty pink ear. He leads her to her carriage, when it stops the way, and he and the millionnaire's wife vanish in the outer darkness.
"Now half to the setting moon are gone,
And half to the rising day;
Low on the sand, and loud on the stone,
The last wheel echoes away."
Edith hums as she toils up to her pretty room. Trixy's grand field night is over—Edith's first ball has come to an end, and the first night of her new life.