“No?  It looked like it, then.  She snubs you in the most merciless manner, and you—­oh, what a penitent face you wore the last time you approached her!  I thought she was a great deal too uplifted for flirting, but what do you call that with George Grosvenor?”

“George Grosvenor is a very old friend.  Here is our redowa, Miss Hunsden.  Never mind Lady Louise.”

His arm encircled her waist, and away they flew.  Sir Everard could dance as well as Lord Ernest, and quite as many admiring eyes followed him and the bright little belle of the ball.  Mr. Grosvenor pulled his tawny mustache with inward delight.

“Handsome couple, eh, Carteret?” he said to his host; “it is an evident case of spoons there.  Well, the boy is only two-and-twenty, and at that age we all lost our heads easily.”

Two angry red spots, quite foreign to her usual complexion, burned on Lady Louise’s fair cheeks.  She turned abruptly away and left the gentlemen.

“Little Harrie is pretty enough to excuse an older man losing his head,” Lord Carteret answered; “but it would not suit Lady Kingsland’s book at all.  The Hunsden is poorer than a church-mouse, and though of one of our best old-country families, the pedigree bears no proportion to my lady’s pride.  A duke’s daughter, in her estimation, would be none too good for her darling son.”

Mr. Grosvenor smiled satirically.

“She is a wonderful woman—­my lady—­but I fancy she is matched at last.  If Kingsland sets his heart on this latest fancy, all the powers of earth and Hades will not move him.  Do you recollect that little affair of Miss Kingsland and poor Douglas of the —­th?  My lady put a stop to that, and he was shot, poor fellow, before Balaklava.  But the son and heir is quite another story.  Apropos, I must ask little Mildred to dance. Adio, Carteret!”

The ball whirled on—­the hours went by like bright, swift flashes, and, from the moment of the redowa, to Sir Everard Kingsland it was one brief, intoxicating dream of delirium.  My Lady Kingsland’s maternal frowns, my Lady Louise’s imperial scorn—­all were forgotten.  She was a madcap and a hoiden—­a wild, hare-brained, fox-hunting Amazon—­all that was shocking and unwomanly, but, at the same time, all that was bright, beautiful, entrancing, irresistible.  His golden-haired ideal, with the azure eyes and seraphic smile was forgotten, and this gray-eyed enchantress, robed in white, crowned with ivy, dancing desperately the whole night long, set brain and heart reeling in the mad tarantella of love.

It was over at last.  The gray and dismal dawn of the November morning stole chilly through the curtained casements.  A half-blown rose from Miss Hunsden’s bouquet bloomed in Sir Everard’s button-hole, and it was Sir Everard’s blissful privilege to fold Miss Hunsden’s furred mantle around those pearly shoulders.

The bleak morning breeze blew her perfumed hair across his eyes, as she leaned on his arm and he handed her into the carriage.