"It was really so?" he demanded eagerly. "It was not your own desire to disappoint me so terribly?"
"Oh, no."
"If you had been left to yourself you would have danced with me?"
"Yes, of course."
"Quite willingly?"
"You know I would!"
Mr. Dalrymple drew a long breath. It was rather a critical moment. But he was no boy, at the mercy of the wind and waves of his own emotions, and Rachel's evident weakness of self-control was an appeal to his strength that he was not the man to disregard. Still it was wonderful how actively during these last few minutes he had come to hate Mr. Kingston, whom he had never seen.
"I suppose," he said presently, "I must not ask the reason for this preposterous proceeding?"
"Do not," she pleaded gently. "There is no reason, really. It is but Mr. Kingston's whim."
"And are you determined to sacrifice me to Mr. Kingston's whim?"
She did not speak, and he repeated his query in a more imperious fashion.
"Are you really going to throw me over altogether, Miss Fetherstonhaugh? I only want to know."
She looked up at him piteously, and he softened at once.
"Tell me what I am to do," he said, in a low voice. "Do you wish me not to ask you for any dances? It is a horrible thing – it is enough to make me wish I had gone to Queensland on Monday, after all – but I will not bother you. Tell me, am I not to ask you at all?"
"If you please," she whispered with a quick sigh, full of despairing resignation. "I am very sorry, but it is right to do what Mr. Kingston wishes."
"That is not my view in this case. However, it is right for me to do what you wish. And I will, though it is very hard."
Here Rachel, feeling all her body like one great beating heart, moved away to the door, driven by a stern sense of social duty.
Her companion did not follow her, and she paused on the threshold, turned round, and then suddenly hurried back to him.
"Mr. Dalrymple," she said, putting out her hand with an impulsive gesture, "do not wish you had gone to Queensland instead of coming here to-night. If you do I shall be miserable!"
He seized her hand immediately, and stooping his tall head at the same moment, brushed it with his moustache. Then, looking up into her scared face, he said – like a man binding himself by some terrible oath:
"That I never will."
Once before in that room they had touched the point where not only mere acquaintance but warmest friendship ends. Then it had been to her a new, incomprehensible experience; now she could not help seeing the reason and the meaning of it, though, perhaps, not so clearly as he.
In a moment she had drawn her hand away, and like a bird frightened from its nest, had vanished out of his sight, leaving him – thoroughly aroused from his normal impassiveness – gazing at the empty doorway behind her.
When they met again, ten minutes afterwards, it was in the drawing-room, which was crowded with people; and through all the crush and noise, she was as acutely conscious of his presence as if he alone had been there.
She moved about with tremulous restlessness and downcast eyes; afraid to look at him – afraid he should look at her; paying her little civilities mechanically, and conducting herself generally, to her aunt's extreme annoyance, more like a bashful schoolgirl and a poor relation than ever.
Mr. Kingston, doing his best to fascinate Miss Hale, who stood beside him, giggling and simpering and twiddling her watch-chain, looked anxiously at his little sweetheart when she entered, thought he saw signs of his own handiwork in her disturbed and downcast face, called her to him, and until the great tea-dinner was over, and they all had to disperse to dress, compassed her with devout attentions, intended to assure her of his royal forgiveness and favour.
But he did not remove the prohibition, which made her more and more resentful as she continued to think about it, and less and less responsive to his ostentatious "kindness;" and he treated Mr. Dalrymple – when he condescended to acknowledge his presence at all – with a supercilious rudeness that Mr. Thornley, in conjugal confidence, declared to be "very bad form," and that prompted the gentle Lucilla to be "nicer" to the younger man than Rachel had ever seen her. He was so open in his hostility that it was generally noticed and talked of (and the cause of it more or less correctly surmised).
The only person who seemed absolutely indifferent to it and to him was Mr. Dalrymple himself; and in his secret heart he was much more glad than angry to have earned such pronounced dislike from such a quarter, though as impatient of what he called "impudence" as anybody.
That Adelonga ball was a memorable event to most of the people that it gathered together – as what ball is not? Mr. Thornley celebrated the coming of age of his son and heir, to begin with. Mrs. Thornley appeared for the first time, "officially," after the birth of her baby, who was the hero of all occasions to her, and inaugurated a great "county" reputation as a charming hostess and woman.
Mrs. Hardy got her best point lace irretrievably ruined by catching it on an unprotected corner of the wire-netting upon which Rachel had worked her decorations; and she also saw the lamentable frustration of several wise plans that she had made.
Two young people became engaged; others, male and female, fell in love, or began those pleasant flirtations which led to love eventually.
Miss Hale on the other hand, quarrelled with Mr. Lessel, who took upon himself to object to her extravagant appreciation of Mr. Kingston's rather extravagant attentions; and their engagement was broken off.
Mr. Lessel at the same time captivated the fancy of a charming young lady, only daughter of the Adelonga family doctor, resident in the township close by, who was destined in less than twelve months to be his wife.
Mr. Kingston, surfeited with balls, had a deeper interest in this one than in any of the hundreds that he had attended in the course of a long and gay career.
Never before had he admired a pretty woman with such ferocious sincerity as he admired his little Rachel to-night; never before had he used such rude tactics to make the object of his affections jealous – thereby to subdue rebellion in her; never before had he been so defied and circumvented by a being in female shape as he was to-night by this presumptive little nobody, whom he had singled out for honour, and who was bound to honour him, and his lightest wish.
As for Mr. Dalrymple and Rachel – they must be classed together in this catalogue of special experiences, for they shared theirs between them – the Adelonga ball marked a new and very memorable departure in the history of their lives. For half the evening they danced decorously apart.
Mr. Dalrymple justified Mrs. Thornley's expectations, of course, and distinguished himself above all the dancing men assembled; Rachel, who had had but little teaching, was a dancer by nature and instinct, as light and effortless, as airy and graceful as a bit of wind-blown thistle-down.
She loved it, as she loved all pleasant and poetic things; and though she could not have the partner she wanted, and had to take whom she could get, she felt to-night, and more and more as the evening wore away, that she had never heard and felt, in the strains of mere senseless instruments and in the thrill of responsive pulses, music of mundane waltzes and galops of such inspired and impassioned beauty.
There was a young artist from Melbourne who played lovely airs on a violin to a piano accompaniment, and he seemed literally to play upon her, spiritually sensitive as she was to-night to the lightest touch of that divine afflatus which makes poetry of certain passages in the most prosaic lives.
Now rapturously happy, now tragically miserable, and tremulously fluctuating up and down between these two extremes, she was blown about like a leaf in autumn wind by the subtle harmonies of that magical violin. At least she thought it was the violin. We know better.
At about twelve o'clock she went into the house on an errand for Lucilla, and came back by way of the conservatory,