"Did you escape in here out of the heat?" he asked her. "But I am afraid no one lets you escape to-night. The occasion is too interesting."
Marcella made no reply. Lady Winterbourne threw in a nervous remark on the crowd.
"Oh, yes, a great crush," said Lord Wandle. "Of course, we all come to see Aldous happy. How long is it, Miss Boyce, since you settled at Mellor?"
"Six months."
She looked straight before her and not at him as she answered, and her tone made Miss Raeburn's blood boil.
Lord Wandle—a battered, coarsened, but still magnificent-looking man of sixty—examined the speaker an instant from half-shut eyes, then put up his hand to his moustache with a half-smile.
"You like the country?"
"Yes."
As she spoke her reluctant monosyllable, the girl had really no conception of the degree of hostility expressed in her manner. Instead she was hating herself for her own pusillanimity.
"And the people?"