recovered her good humour, and kept up her part of the broken chat
possible under the circumstances, with enough grace and spirit to give
to her extraordinary beauty the last crowning charm which Percy had not,
until then, found in it.

Thus they finished their quadrille in good humour with each other, but
as they left their place to rejoin Mrs. Bellairs, Maurice Leigh came
into the room by a side door. The sight of him reminded Mr. Percy of the
short dialogue he had heard.

"You are engaged for the next quadrille, are you not?" he asked Lucia.

"Yes, to Maurice. I promised it to him instead of the first."

"You were to have danced this one with him, then?"

She laughed. "It is a childish arrangement of ours," she said; "we
agreed, long ago, always to dance the first quadrille together, and
everybody knows of it, so no one asks me for that."

"I wonder at his being willing to miss his privilege to-night; you must
be very indulgent, not to punish him."

"Oh! you know he is acting as a kind of steward to-night and has so many
things to do. It was not his fault."

"And you would have waited patiently for him?"

"Patiently? I don't know. Certainly I should have waited, for no one but
a stranger would have asked me to dance."