The strong and strange thing--that which moves on its way as do birth and death, and the rising and setting of the sun--had begun to move in them.It was no new and rare thing, but an ancient and common one--as common and ancient as death and birth themselves; and part of the law as they are.As it comes to royal persons to whom one makes obeisance at their mere passing by, as it comes to scullery maids in royal kitchens, and grooms in royal stables, as it comes to ladies-in-waiting and the women who serve them, so it had come to these two who had been drawn near to each other from the opposite sides of the earth, and each started at the touch of it, and withdrew a pace in bewilderment, and some fear.
"I wish," Mount Dunstan was feeling throughout the evening, "that her eyes had some fault in their expression--that they drew one less--that they drew ME less.I am losing my head.""It would be better," Betty thought, "if I did not wish so much that he would come and ask me to dance with him--that he would not keep away so.He is keeping away for a reason.Why is he doing it?"The music swung on in lovely measures, and the dancers swung with it.Sir Nigel walked dutifully through the Lancers once with his wife, and once with his beautiful sister-in-law.
Lady Anstruthers, in her new bloom, had not lacked partners, who discovered that she was a childishly light creature who danced extremely well.Everyone was kind to her, and the very grand old ladies, who admired Betty, were absolutely benign in their manner.Betty's partners paid ingenuous court to her, and Sir Nigel found he had not been mistaken in his estimate of the dignity his position of escort and male relation gave to him.
Rosy, standing for a moment looking out on the brilliancy and state about her, meeting Betty's eyes, laughed quiveringly.
"I am in a dream," she said.
"You have awakened from a dream," Betty answered.
From the opposite side of the room someone was coming towards them, and, seeing him, Rosy smiled in welcome.
"I am sure Lord Mount Dunstan is coming to ask you to dance with him," she said."Why have you not danced with him before, Betty?""He has not asked me," Betty answered."That is the only reason.""Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt called at the Mount a few days after they met him at Stornham," Rosalie explained in an undertone."They wanted to know him.Then it seems they found they liked each other.Lady Dunholm has been telling me about it.She says Lord Dunholm thanks you, because you said something illuminating.That was the word she used--`illuminating.' I believe you are always illuminating, Betty."Mount Dunstan was certainly coming to them.How broad his shoulders looked in his close-fitting black coat, how well built his whole strong body was, and how steadily he held his eyes! Here and there one sees a man or woman who is, through some trick of fate, by nature a compelling thing unconsciously demanding that one should submit to some domineering attraction.
One does not call it domineering, but it is so.This special creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her single share of force.Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as this "other one" came to her.He did not use the ballroom formula when he spoke to her.He said in rather a low voice:
"Will you dance with me?"
"Yes," she answered.
Lord Dunholm and his wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable a pair had never before danced together in their ballroom.
Certainly no pair had ever been watched with quite the same interested curiosity.Some onlookers thought it singular that they should dance together at all, some pleased themselves by reflecting on the fact that no other two could have represented with such picturesqueness the opposite poles of fate and circumstance.No one attempted to deny that they were an extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one's eyes followed them in spite of one's self.
"Taken together they produce an effect that is somehow rather amazing," old Lady Alanby commented."He is a magnificently built man, you know, and she is a magnificently built girl.Everybody should look like that.My impression would be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that neither of them had any particular character.That affair of the apple was so silly.Eve has always struck me as being the kind of woman who, if she lived to-day, would run up stupid bills at her dressmakers and be afraid to tell her husband.That wonderful black head of Miss Vanderpoel's looks very nice poised near Mount Dunstan's dark red one.""I am glad to be dancing with him," Betty was thinking.
"I am glad to be near him."
"Will you dance this with me to the very end," asked Mount Dunstan--"to the very late note?""Yes," answered Betty.
He had spoken in a low but level voice--the kind of voice whose tone places a man and woman alone together, and wholly apart from all others by whomsoever they are surrounded.
There had been no preliminary speech and no explanation of the request followed.The music was a perfect thing, the brilliant, lofty ballroom, the beauty of colour and sound about them, the jewels and fair faces, the warm breath of flowers in the air, the very sense of royal presence and its accompanying state and ceremony, seemed merely a naturally arranged background for the strange consciousness each held close and silently--knowing nothing of the mind of the other.
This was what was passing through the man's mind.
