“Ah, yes, to be sure. I wish he would come and ask you to dance,” said Mrs Greville, carelessly.
But Mary felt as if “the dance had all gone out of her.” Her mental tremors now took a new form—dread of her sister’s return, and, more in cowardice than because she had the slightest wish to move, she accepted Mr Greville’s offer of a convoy across the room “for a change; Mr Knox will look after my wife till your sister comes back,” he said, good-naturedly.
“Across the room,” Mary met with an unexpected invitation to “join the dance.” The major of the 210th was an old friend of Mr Greville’s, and being a quiet, retiring man, the number of his acquaintances at Brocklehurst was not large. He did not care much about dancing, but after chatting to Mr Greville for a minute or two, he discovered that the girl on his friend’s arm had a nice face and an undoubtedly beautiful pair of eyes, and, before Mary knew what she was about, she was dancing with Major Throckmorton, and engaged to him for the quadrille to follow. Between the dances her partner proposed that they should walk up and down the long corridor into which the ball-room opened, and Mary, caring little—so completely were her thoughts absorbed with Lilias—where she went, absently agreed. Major Throckmorton was so shy himself that he naturally attributed to the same cause the peculiarity of the young lady’s manner, and liked her none the less on account of it. But before the quadrille had reached the end of its first figure, his theory had received a shock. For suddenly his partner’s whole manner changed. She smiled, and talked, and laughed, and seemed interested; where before he had only succeeded in extracting the most indistinct of monosyllables, she now answered with intelligence and perfect self-possession, hazarding observations of her own in a way which proved her to be by no means the timid, ill-assured country maiden he had imagined her.
“What a curiously changeable girl!” he said to himself. “Five minutes ago I did not feel sure that she took in the sense of a word I said to her, and now she is as composed and rational as possible, and evidently a well-educated girl. What queer creatures women are!”
His glance ran down the lines of faces opposite them. Among them one arrested his attention. “What a beautiful girl,” he exclaimed; “the most beautiful in the room, in my opinion. Do you happen to know who she is, Miss Western?”
Mary’s eyes followed willingly in the direction he pointed out—whither, indeed, they had already been frequently wandering—and her whole face lighted up with a happy smile.
“Do you think her the most beautiful girl in the room?” she said. “I am so glad, for she is my sister. Do you know the gentleman she is dancing with?”
Major Throckmorton glanced at Lilias’s partner. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I do. I know so few people here. He is a good-looking fellow, and,” he hesitated, and glanced again in Miss Western’s direction, then added with a kindly smile, “it is evident he would agree with my opinion as to who is the most beautiful girl in the room.”
Mary smiled too, and blushed a little, and decided that her partner was one of the pleasantest men she had ever met. And poor Major Throckmorton thought how pretty she looked when she blushed, and said to himself that before long, very probably, some other fellow would be appropriating her, as her beautiful sister evidently was already appropriated, and he sighed to think that, not withstanding his eighteen years’ service, such good luck had never yet come in his way! For it was a case of “uncommonly little besides his pay,” and beautiful girls were not for such as he.