'It sounds rather frisky.'
'I only hope that nobody noticed it,' pursues the Vicaress; 'he always makes those kind of mistakes when he wants change. Dear me!' casting a look and a long sigh of envy round the room; 'if I had a house like this, I should never want change for my part; and to think that it is to be shut up for the whole of the winter—for a whole year, in fact!'
The Hartleys' house has not, so far, afforded Peggy such a large harvest of pleasure that she is able very cordially to echo this lamentation.
'What can possess any one to go round the world passes my understanding,' continues her interlocutor, pelican-like, as she speaks, forcing some nougat for her offspring surreptitiously into a little bag under cover of the table-edge; 'not but what they will do it in all possible luxury, of course—cheval glasses, and oil-paintings, and Indian carpets, just as one has in one's own drawing-room.'
At this last clause, sad and inattentive as she is, Peggy cannot forbear a smile of amusement, as the image of the Vicarage Kidder rises before her mind's eye; but it is very soon dissipated by her neighbour's next remark.
'By the bye, some one was telling me to-night that Freddy Ducane is to be of the party. I assured her, looking wise, that I knew better; but she persisted that she had had it upon the best authority—one of the family, as far as I could understand.'
She may continue her speech to the ambient air; for, when next she looks up from her larceny of bonbons, Peggy is gone. The hall, meanwhile, has been cleared of its innumerable chairs, and its theatrical properties generally, and converted into a back-room, with that surprising rapidity that unlimited money, with practically unlimited labour at its beck and call, can always command.
No sooner have the guests well supped, than, with no tiresome interregnum, no waiting and wondering, they may, if they list, begin to dance. A smooth sea of Vienna parquet spreads before them, and established on the stage, the British Grenadiers themselves—no mere piano and fiddle—are striking up the initial quadrille. It is some little time before Peggy is able to make her way between the forming sets to where milady sits, her coronet more hopelessly askew than ever, and an expression of good-humoured resignation on her face.
'My mind is braced for the worst,' she says good-naturedly; 'get along both of you and dance. Not that there can be much dancing in this silly child,' pointing to Prue; 'she must be as empty as a drum. She has not eaten a mouthful.'
She shrugs her shoulders, since it is evident that Prue does not hear. In a state of preoccupation so intense as that of the young girl's, it would be difficult for anything presented by the senses to make its way into the brain. She is standing stiffly upright, her head and chin slightly advanced, as one looking with passionate eagerness ahead. Her lips are moving, as if she were saying some one thing over and over to herself. Whatever of her face is not lividly white is burning; and her eyes——