Llewellyn Fenton was Harry’s youngest brother and the dearest friend he had in the world. Though he was only twenty-one, and consequently four years Harry’s junior, there had never been much real difference between the two, the elder being younger than his age, and the younger considerably older. Since their early boyhood they had held together, Harry clinging rather to the harder nature of Llewellyn, and now that they had grown up and gone their different ways, they took every chance of meeting they could get. The Squire on the other side of the ball-room caught sight of them standing together, and smiled as he saw them exchange nods and go off to their respective partners; he liked all his four boys, but Harry and Llewellyn were the pair which appealed to him most.
The evening went on cheerfully, and dance succeeded dance. The brothers had run up against each other again, and were watching a quadrille from the door of the supper-room.
“Llewellyn,” said Harry, taking hold of his arm, “who is that girl? There, look. Dancing with Tom Bradford.”
“I don’t know,” said his brother. “Let go, Harry.”
“Good heavens! isn’t she pretty?” he went on, unheeding, and gripping Llewellyn.
“Well, yes,” said the other, disengaging himself. “She is, there’s no denying that.”
“Do you want to deny it?” asked Harry, with a contemptuous snort.
“N—no, I don’t.”
The girl in question was dancing in a set immediately in front of them. She was a little over the middle height, though in these modern days of tall women she would probably pass unnoticed on that score. She seemed quite young, barely out of her teens, but her self-possession was as complete as that quality can be when it is mixed with self-consciousness—not the highest sort of self-possession, but always something. One could not blame her for being alive to her own good looks, they were so intensely obvious, and her complexion, which struck one at once, was of that rose-and-white sort which reminds the spectator of fruit—soft, and with a bloom on it like the down of a butterfly’s wing.