Then in a flash the forgotten legend of the Maid-at-Arms came back to me, ringing through my ears in clamorous words:
"Serene, 'mid love's alarms,
For all time shall the Maids-at-Arms,
Wearing the ghost-ring, triumph with their constancy!"
I sprang to the door in my excitement and stared at the picture of the Maid-at-Arms.
Sweetly the violet eyes of the maid looked back at me, her armor glittered, her soft throat seemed to swell with the breath of life.
Then I crept nearer, eyes fixed on her wedding-finger. And I saw there a faint rosy circle as though a golden ring had pressed the snowy flesh.
XIII
THE MAID-AT-ARMS
I remember little of that dinner save that it differed vastly from the quarrelsome carousal at which the Johnsons and Butlers figured in so sinister a rôle, and at which the Glencoe captains disgraced themselves. But now, if the patroon's wine lent new color to the fair faces round me, there was no feverish laughter, nothing of brutal license. Healths were given and drunk with all the kindly ceremony to which I had been accustomed. At times pattering gusts of hand-clapping followed some popular toast, such as "Our New Flag," to which General Schuyler responded in perfect taste, veiling the deep emotions that the toast stirred in many with graceful allegory tempered by modesty and self-restraint.
At the former dinner I had had for my neighbors Dorothy and Magdalen Brant. Now I sat between Miss Haldimand and Maddaleen Dirck, whom I had for partner, a pretty little thing, who peppered her conversation with fashionable New York phrases and spiced the intervals with French. And I remember she assured me that New York was the only city fit to live in and that she should never survive a prolonged transportation from that earthly paradise of elegance and fashion. Which made me itch to go there.