yet, this evening, she had not made her appearance,--a sin against
etiquette very unusual in her. Perhaps her recent conversation with
Dalibard had absorbed her thoughts to forgetfulness of the less important
demands on her attention. Her absence had not interfered with the gayety
at the tea-table, which was frank even to noisiness as it centred round
the laughing face of Ardworth, who, though unknown to most or all of the
ladies present, beyond a brief introduction to one or two of the first
comers from Sir Miles (as the host had risen from his chess to bid them
welcome), had already contrived to make himself perfectly at home and
outrageously popular. Niched between two bouncing lasses, he had
commenced acquaintance with them in a strain of familiar drollery and
fun, which had soon broadened its circle, and now embraced the whole
group in the happy contagion of good-humour and young animal spirits.
Gabriel, allowed to sit up later than his usual hour, had not, as might
have been expected, attached himself to this circle, nor indeed to any;
he might be seen moving quietly about,--now contemplating the pictures on
the wall with a curious eye; now pausing at the whist-table, and noting
the game with the interest of an embryo gamester; now throwing himself on
an ottoman, and trying to coax towards him Dash or Ponto,--trying in
vain, for both the dogs abhorred him; yet still, through all this general
movement, had any one taken the pains to observe him closely, it might
have been sufficiently apparent that his keen, bright, restless eye, from
the corner of its long, sly lids, roved chiefly towards the three persons
whom he approached the least,--his father, Mainwaring, and Mr. Vernon.
This last had ensconced himself apart from all, in the angle formed by
one of the pilasters of the arch that divided the room, so that he was in
command, as it were, of both sections. Reclined, with the careless grace
that seemed inseparable from every attitude and motion of his person, in
one of the great velvet chairs, with a book in his hand, which, to say
truth, was turned upside down, but in the lecture of which he seemed