The girl laughed out.  “Only one—­but he’s so intimate.”

Mrs. Jordan just hesitated.  “He’s a gentleman?”

“Yes, he’s not a lady.”

Her interlocutress appeared to muse.  “She’s immensely surrounded.”

“She will be—­with Mr. Drake!”

Mrs. Jordan’s gaze became strangely fixed.  “Is she very good-looking?”

“The handsomest person I know.”

Mrs. Jordan continued to brood.  “Well, I know some beauties.”  Then with her odd jerkiness:  “Do you think she looks good?”

“Because that’s not always the case with the good-looking?”—­the other took it up.  “No, indeed, it isn’t:  that’s one thing Cocker’s has taught me.  Still, there are some people who have everything.  Lady Bradeen, at any rate, has enough:  eyes and a nose and a mouth, a complexion, a figure—­”

“A figure?” Mrs. Jordan almost broke in.

“A figure, a head of hair!” The girl made a little conscious motion that seemed to let the hair all down, and her companion watched the wonderful show.  “But Mr. Drake is another—?”

“Another?”—­Mrs. Jordan’s thoughts had to come back from a distance.

“Of her ladyship’s admirers.  He’s ‘going,’ you say, to her?”

At this Mrs. Jordan really faltered.  “She has engaged him.”

“Engaged him?”—­our young woman was quite at sea.

“In the same capacity as Lord Rye.”

“And was Lord Rye engaged?”

CHAPTER XXVI

Mrs. Jordan looked away from her now—­looked, she thought, rather injured and, as if trifled with, even a little angry.  The mention of Lady Bradeen had frustrated for a while the convergence of our heroine’s thoughts; but with this impression of her old friend’s combined impatience and diffidence they began again to whirl round her, and continued it till one of them appeared to dart at her, out of the dance, as if with a sharp peck.  It came to her with a lively shock, with a positive sting, that Mr. Drake was—­could it be possible?  With the idea she found herself afresh on the edge of laughter, of a sudden and strange perversity of mirth.  Mr. Drake loomed, in a swift image, before her; such a figure as she had seen in open doorways of houses in Cocker’s quarter—­majestic, middle-aged, erect, flanked on either side by a footman and taking the name of a visitor.  Mr. Drake then verily was a person who opened the door!  Before she had time, however, to recover from the effect of her evocation, she was offered a vision which quite engulfed it.  It was communicated to her somehow that the face with which she had seen it rise prompted Mrs. Jordan to dash, a bit wildly, at something, at anything, that might attenuate criticism.  “Lady Bradeen’s re-arranging—­she’s going to be married.”

“Married?” The girl echoed it ever so softly, but there it was at last.