The Westcotes | Page 8

of rebuking him, she was angry with herself all the way home.
CHAPTER III
A BALL, A SNOWSTORM, AND A SNOWBALL
Axcester's December Ball was a social event of importance in South Somerset. At once formal and familiar--familiar, since nine-tenths of the company dwelt close enough together to be on visiting terms--it nicely preluded the domestic festivities of Christmas, and the more public ones which began with the New Year and culminated in the great County Balls at Taunton and Bath. Nor were the families around Axcester jaded with dancing, as those in the neighbourhood of Bath, for example; but discussed dresses and the prospects of the Ball for some weeks beforehand, and, when the day came, ordered out the chariot or barouche in defiance of any ordinary weather.
The weather since Dorothea's visit to the Orange Room had included a frost, a fall of snow with a partial thaw, and a second and much severer frost; and by Wednesday afternoon the hill below Bayfield wore a hard and slippery glaze. Endymion, however, had seen to the roughing of the horses. Thin powdery snow began to fall as the Bayfield barouche rolled past the gates into the high road; and Narcissus, who considered himself a weather-prophet, foretold a thaw before morning. Unless the weather grew worse, the party would drive back to Bayfield; but the old caretaker in the Town House had orders to light fires there and prepare the bedrooms, and on the chance of being detained. Dorothea had brought her maid Polly.
In spite of her previous visit, the Orange Room gave her a shock of delight and wonder. The litter had vanished, the hangings were in place; fresh orange-coloured curtains divided the dancing-floor from the recess beneath the gallery, and this had been furnished as a withdrawing-room, with rugs, settees, groups of green foliage plants, and candles, the light of which shone through shades of yellow paper. The prisoners, too, had adorned with varicoloured paperwork the candelabra, girandoles and mirrors which drew twinkles from the long waxed floor, and softened whatever might have been garish in the decorations. Certainly the panels took a new beauty, a luminous delicacy, in their artificial rays; and Dorothea, when, after much greeting and hand-shaking, she joined one of the groups inspecting them, felt a sort of proprietary pleasure in the praises she heard.
Had she known it, she too was looking her best tonight--in an old- maidish fashion, be it understood. She wore a gown of ashen-grey muslin, edged with swansdown, and tied with sash and shoulder-knots of a flame-hued ribbon which had taken her fancy at Bath in the autumn. Her sandal-shoes, stockings, gloves, cap--she had worn caps for six or seven years now,--even her fan, were of the same ash-coloured grey.
Dorothea knew how to dress. She also knew how to dance. The music made her heart beat faster, and she never entered a ball-room without a sense of happy expectancy. Poor lady! she never left but she carried home heart-sickness, weariness, and a discontent of which she purged her soul, on her knees, before lying down to sleep. She had a contrite spirit; she knew that her lot was a fortunate one; but she envied her maid Polly her good looks at times. With Polly's face, she might have dancing to her heart's content. Usually she dropped some tears on her pillow after a night's gaiety.
At Bath, at Taunton, at Axcester, it had always been the same, and with time she had learnt to set her hopes low and steel her heart early to their inevitable disappointment. So tonight she took her seat against the wall and watched while the first three _contre-danses_ went by without bringing her a partner. For the fourth--the "Soldier's joy"-- she was claimed by an awkward schoolboy, home for the holidays; whether out of duty or obeying the law of Nature by which shy youths are attracted to middle-aged partners, she could not tell, nor did she ask herself, but danced the dance and enjoyed it more than her cavalier was ever likely to guess. Such a chance had, before now, been looked back upon as the one bright spot in a long evening's experience. Dorothea loved all schoolboys for the kindness shown to her by these few.
She went back to her seat, hard by a group to which Endymion was discoursing at large. Endymion's was a mellow voice, of rich compass, and he had a knack of compelling the attention of all persons within range. He preferred this to addressing anyone in particular, and his eye sought and found, and gathered by instinct, the last loiterer without the charmed circle.
"Yes," he was saying, "it is tasteful, and something more. It illustrates, as you well say, the better side of our excitable neighbours across the Channel. Setting patriotism apart and