other, giggling. They hung about, partly through thrilled interest, and partly because their joy made them eager to courtesy to her as she came out, the obeisance seeming to identify them even more closely with the coming treat. They grinned and beamed rosily, and Emily smiled at them and nodded, uplifted by a pleasure almost as infantile as their own. She was really enjoying herself so honestly that she did not realise how hard she worked during the days before the festivity. She was really ingenious, and invented a number of new methods of entertainment. It was she who, with the aid of a couple of gardeners, transformed the tents into bowers of green boughs and arranged the decorations of the tables and the park gates.
“What a lot of walking you do!” Lord Walderhurst said to her once, as she passed the group on the lawn. “Do you know how many hours you have been on your feet to-day?”
“I like it,” she answered, and, as she hurried by, she saw that he was sitting a shade nearer to Lady Agatha than she had ever seen him sit before, and that Agatha, under a large hat of white gauze frills, was looking like a seraph, so sweet and shining were her eyes, so flower-fair her face. She looked actually happy.
“Perhaps he has been saying things,” Emily thought. “How happy she will be! He has such a nice pair of eyes. He would make a woman very happy.” A faint sigh fluttered from her lips. She was beginning to be physically tired, and was not yet quite aware of it. If she had not been physically tired, she would not even vaguely have had, at this moment, recalled to her mind the fact that she was not of the women to whom “things” are said and to whom things happen.
“Emily Fox-Seton,” remarked Lady Maria, fanning herself, as it was frightfully hot, “has the most admirable effect on me. She makes me feel generous. I should like to present her with the smartest things from the wardrobes of all my relations.”
“Do you give her clothes?” asked Walderhurst.
“I haven’t any to spare. But I know they would be useful to her. The things she wears are touching; they are so well contrived, and produce such a decent effect with so little.”
Lord Walderhurst inserted his monocle and gazed after the straight, well-set-up back of the disappearing Miss Fox-Seton.
“I think,” said Lady Agatha, gently, “that she is really handsome.”
“So she is,” admitted Walderhurst—“quite a good-looking woman.”
That night Lady Agatha repeated the amiability to Emily, whose grateful amazement really made her blush.
“Lord Walderhurst knows Sir Bruce Norman,” said Agatha. “Isn’t it strange? He spoke of him to me to-day. He says he is clever.”
“You had a nice talk this afternoon, hadn’t you?” said Emily. “You both looked so—so—as if you were enjoying yourselves when I passed.”
“Did he look as if he were enjoying himself? He was very agreeable. I did not know he could be so agreeable.”
“I have never seen him look as much pleased,” answered Emily Fox-Seton. “Though he always looks as if he liked talking to you, Lady Agatha. That large white gauze garden-hat”—reflectively—“is so very becoming.”
“It was very expensive,” sighed lovely Agatha. “And they last such a short time. Mamma said it really seemed almost criminal to buy it.”
“How delightful it will be,” remarked cheering Emily, “when—when you need not think of things like that!”
“Oh!”—with another sigh, this time a catch of the breath,—“it would be like Heaven! People don’t know; they think girls are frivolous when they care, and that it isn’t serious. But when one knows one must have things,—that they are like bread,—it is awful!”
“The things you wear really matter.” Emily was bringing all her powers to bear upon the subject, and with an anxious kindness which was quite angelic. “Each dress makes you look like another sort of picture. Have you,”—contemplatively—“anything quite different to wear tonight and tomorrow?”
“I have two evening dresses I have not worn here yet”—a little hesitatingly. “I—well I saved them. One is a very thin black one with silver on it. It has a trembling silver butterfly for the shoulder, and one for the hair.”
“Oh, put that on tonight!” said Emily, eagerly. “When you come down to dinner you will look so—so new! I always think that to see a fair person suddenly for the first time all in black gives one a kind of delighted start—though start isn’t the word, quite. Do put it on.”
Lady Agatha put it on. Emily Fox-Seton came into her room to help to add the last touches to her beauty before she went down to dinner. She suggested that the fair hair should be dressed even higher and more lightly than usual, so that the silver butterfly should poise the more airily over the knot, with its quivering, outstretched wings. She herself poised the butterfly high upon the shoulder.
“Oh, it is lovely!” she exclaimed, drawing back to gaze at the girl. “Do let me go down a moment or so before you do, so that I can see you come into the room.”
She was sitting in a chair quite near Lord Walderhurst when her charge entered. She saw him really give something quite like a start when Agatha appeared. His monocle, which had been in his eye, fell out of it, and he picked it up by its thin cord and replaced it.
“Psyche!” she heard him say in his odd voice, which seemed merely to make a statement without committing him to an opinion—“Psyche!”
He did not say it to her or to any one else. It was simply a kind of exclamation,—appreciative and perceptive without being enthusiastic,—and it was curious. He talked to Agatha nearly all the evening.
Emily came to Lady Agatha before she retired, looking even a little flushed.
“What are you going to wear at the treat tomorrow?” she asked.
“A white muslin, with entre-deux of lace, and the gauze garden-hat, and a white parasol and shoes.”
Lady Agatha looked a little nervous; her pink fluttered in her cheek.
“And tomorrow night?” said Emily.
“I have a very pale blue. Won’t you sit down, dear Miss Fox-Seton?”
“We must both go to bed and sleep. You must not get tired.”
But she sat down for a few minutes, because she saw the girl’s eyes asking her to do it.
The afternoon post had brought a more than usually depressing letter from Curzon Street. Lady Claraway was at her motherly wits’ ends, and was really quite touching in her distraction. A dressmaker was entering a suit. The thing would get into the papers, of course.
“Unless something happens, something to save us by staving off things, we shall have to go to Castle Clare at once. It will be all over. No girl could be presented with such a thing in the air. They don’t like it.”
“They,” of course, meant persons whose opinions made London’s society’s law.
“To go to Castle Clare,” faltered Agatha, “will be like being sentenced to starve to death. Alix and Hilda and Millicent and Eve and I will be starved, quite slowly, for the want of the things that make girls’ lives bearable when they have been born in a certain class. And even if the most splendid thing happened in three or four years, it would be too late for us four—almost too late for Eve. If you are out of London, of course you are forgotten. People can’t help forgetting. Why shouldn’t they, when there are such crowds of new girls every year?”
Emily Fox-Seton was sweet. She was quite sure that they would not be obliged to go to Castle Clare. Without being indelicate, she was really able to bring hope to the fore. She said a good deal of the black gauze dress and the lovely effect of the silver butterflies.
“I suppose it was the butterflies which made Lord Walderhurst say ‘Psyche! Psyche!’ when he first saw you,”