When Prue and Robin had left the conservatory a sufficiently long time to insure their return to the ball-room, out from behind a clump of plants slipped Sir Geoffrey Beaudesert. Observing her exit from the ball-room with a tall and conspicuously habited masker, he had followed with the intention of interrupting a tête-à-tête and forestalling one of Prue's little flirtations that, however harmless in themselves, were dangerous, as he knew by experience, to anterior claims.
When he found that, avoiding the well-lighted rooms, Prue guided her companion to an out-of-the-way retreat, where it was unlikely that they would be disturbed by any one less familiar with the house than herself, his annoyance increased, and with it his anxiety to know who the favored swain might be, and when Peggie, with the good-natured intention of giving Robin an opportunity, left them to rid herself of her sheepskin, the green-eyed monster took complete possession of Sir Geoffrey and prompted a baseness of which, a moment before, he would have blushed to think himself capable.
The only available concealment was at such a distance that at first nothing reached him but the murmur of voices. He could see that Prue stretched out her hands to her companion, and that he kissed them with ardor, but until his own name was mentioned, he heard nothing but a disjointed word here and there. Then, with ears preternaturally sharpened by something even more poignant than jealousy, he overheard Prue's repudiation of himself and her companion's expression of relief and gratitude for the same.
It was fortunate, perhaps, that the colloquy was so soon brought to an end by Peggie's eagerness to carry her cousin off to the ball-room, whither Sir Geoffrey followed as quickly as he deemed wise, only to find Prue already standing up in a country-dance, and the tall masker in scarlet missing. He hunted everywhere for him, but in vain, and finally withdrew to one of the card-rooms, where he played with a marked absence of his usual skill, and also of the luck for which he was proverbial.
At midnight a flourish of trumpets announced that the moment for unmasking had arrived. The dancers formed a double line and marched past the dais, each couple unmasking as they saluted the duchess and her royal guest. Following them came an almost interminable procession of the beauty, talent and rank of the country, and among the very last of these, Sir Geoffrey's search was rewarded. The tall figure in its scarlet drapery suddenly appeared, he knew not whence, and within a few feet of him, doffed domino and mask and revealed the familiar but unlooked-for person of Lord Beachcombe.
Instantly there flashed into Sir Geoffrey's mind an explanation of the words he had overheard, which roused him to an almost uncontrollable fury. This man, once his rival, was still in love with Prue, and after goading him into a monstrous wager about her, had exerted some infernal arts or arguments to induce her to play the jilt once more and thus rob him, at one stroke, of his bride and his money.
"Oh!" he muttered, with intense bitterness, "such a trick is worthy of a man who would not pay his own sister's dowry, until he was sued for it! He shall answer for this treachery with his heart's best blood, and as for her—" His look boded ill for the future of the capricious beauty toward whom his feeling just then was less like love than hate. He was forced into self-control, however, by the reflection that to provoke a meeting on this issue would place him in a more than equivocal position and that it would be necessary to find some other cause of quarrel.
Beachcombe, meanwhile, unconscious of what had happened under shelter of his disguise, saluted his hostess and his sovereign and passed on with a bland exterior and a temper in a highly inflammable state.
Sir Geoffrey lost no time in throwing himself in Beachcombe's way. They exchanged greetings and then, "How goes the courting?" asked my lord. "How is it you are not in attendance on the fair widow?"
Sir Geoffrey's fury choked him. Was ever such impudence as this scoundrel's?