“There she is,” she said. “That girl in black over there by the fireplace. Maisie, my dear,” for a step or two had brought them to the indicated spot, “I want to introduce my old friend, Mr Despard Norreys, to you. Mr Norreys—Miss Fforde;” and as she pronounced the names she drew her hand quietly away, and turned back towards her post at the door.
Despard bowed and, with the very slightest possible instinct of curiosity, glanced at the girl before him. She was of middle height, rather indeed under than above it; she was neither very fair nor very dark; there was nothing very special or striking in her appearance. She was dressed in black; there was nothing remarkable about her attire, rather, as Despard saw in an instant, an absence of style, of finish, which found its epithet at once in his thoughts—“countrified, of course,” he said to himself. But before he had time to decide on his next movement she raised her eyes, and for half an instant his attention deepened. The eyes were strikingly fine; they were very blue, but redeemed from the shallowness of very blue eyes by the depth of the eyelashes, both upper and lower. And just now there was a brightness, an expectancy in the eyes which was by no means their constant expression. For, lashes notwithstanding, Miss Fforde’s blue eyes could look cold enough when she chose.
“Good eyes,” thought Despard. But just as he allowed the words to shape themselves in his brain, he noticed that over the girl’s clear, pale face a glow of colour was quickly spreading.
“Good gracious!” he ejaculated mentally, “she is blushing! What a bread-and-butter miss she must be—to blush because a man’s introduced to her. And I am to draw her out! It is really too bad of Mrs Englewood;” and he half began to turn away with a sensation of indignation and almost of disgust.
But positive rudeness where a woman was concerned did not come easy to him. He stopped, and muttered something indistinctly enough about “the pleasure of a dance.” The girl had grown pale again by this time, and in her eyes a half startled, almost pained expression was replacing the glad expectancy. As he spoke, however, something of the former look returned to them.
“I—I shall be very pleased,” she said. “I am not engaged for anything.”
“I should think not,” he said to himself. “I am quite sure you dance atrociously.”
But aloud he said with the slow, impassive tone in which some of his admirers considered him so to excel that “Despard’s drawl” had its school of followers—
“Shall we say the—the tenth waltz? I fear it is the first I can propose.”
“Thank you,” Miss Fforde replied. She looked as if she would have been ready to say more had he in the least encouraged it, but he, feeling that he had done his duty, turned away—the more eagerly as at that moment he caught sight in the crowd of a lady he knew.