She did not make the slightest move towards leaving, however.

She looked straight at Cuthbert, and Elma could have sworn she saw her lip quiver.

"I believe I have to apologize to you," she said in a very cold voice.

"I cut out a dance, didn't I--at the Calthorps'!"

"Did you?" asked Cuthbert.

Elma wondered that he could be so negligent in speaking to Adelaide Maud. She never could bear to see Cuthbert severe, and it had the effect of terrifying her a trifle and making her take the hand of Adelaide Maud in a defensive sort of manner.

Adelaide Maud held her hand quite tightly, as though Elma were really a friend of some standing.

"I didn't intend to, but I know it seemed like it," said Adelaide Maud in perfectly freezing tones.

Cuthbert looked at her very directly, and seemed to answer the freezing side more than the apologizing one.

"Oh--a small thing of that sort, what does it matter"? he said grandly.

Adelaide Maud turned quite pale.

"Thank you," said she. "It's quite sweet of you to take it like that,"

and she marched out of the schoolroom with her skirts swishing and her head high. No--it would never do to invite Adelaide Maud to the party.

Elma however had seen another side to this very dignified lady, and so ran after her and took her hand again.

"You aren't vexed with me, are you?" she whispered.

Adelaide Maud at the turn of the stairs, and just at the point where Cuthbert, coming savagely behind, could not see, bent and kissed Elma.

"What day do you go to Miss Grace's?" she asked.

"To-morrow at three," whispered Elma, with her plans quite suddenly arranged.

"Don't tell," said Adelaide Maud, "I shall be there."

Mrs. Dudgeon departed with appropriate graciousness. The irrepressible gaiety of the company round her had merely served to make her more unapproachable. She greeted Adelaide Maud with a stare, and strove to make her immediate adieus. Mr. Maclean, always ready to notice a deficiency, remembered that Mr. Leighton had never met Adelaide Maud, and forthwith introduced her. Adelaide Maud took this introduction shyly, and Mr. Leighton was charmed with her. With an unfaltering estimate of character he appraised her then as being one in a hundred amongst girls. Adelaide Maud, on her part, showed him gentle little asides to her nature which one could not have believed existed. Mrs.

Dudgeon grew really impatient at the constant interruptions which impeded her exit.

"Mr. Leighton has just been telling me," she said by way of getting out of the drawing-room, "that a little party is to be celebrated here to-night. I fear we detain you all." Nothing could have been more gracious--and yet! Mabel flushed. It seemed so like a children's affair--that they should be having a party, and that the really important people were actually clearing out in order to allow it to occur.

Miss Steven said farewell with real regret.

"I don't know when I have had such a jolly afternoon," she said. "I think I must get knocked over oftener. Though I don't want Mr. Leighton to break his ribs every time. Do you know," she said in a most heart-breaking manner, "I've been hardly able to breathe for thinking of it. You can't think how nice it is to see you all so jolly after all."

When they had got into the Dudgeons' carriage, and were rolling swiftly homewards, she yawned a trifle.

"What cures they are," she said airily.

Adelaide Maud, in her silent corner of the carriage, felt her third pang of that memorable afternoon.

CHAPTER VIII

The Party

n.o.body knew how anybody got dressed for the party, and certainly n.o.body took any dinner to speak of. It was laid in the morning-room, and Mr.

Leighton said throughout that roystering meal that never again, no matter how many ribs Cuthbert broke or how much sympathy he excited, would he allow them to have a party.

The occasion became memorable, not only because of Cuthbert or the mayonnaise, or the Dudgeons, but because on that night Robin Meredith appeared. Mabel and Jean lately had already in quite a practical manner begun to wonder whom Mabel would be obliged to marry. Jean was getting very tall, and showed signs of being so near the grown-up stage herself, that she was anxious to see Mabel disposed of, so as to leave the way clear.

"The eldest of four ought to look sharp," she declared; "we can't allow any trifling."

This seemed rather overwhelming treatment of Mabel, who was only seventeen. But viewed from that age, even a girl of twenty-one is sometimes voted an old maid, and Mabel was quite determined not to become an old maid.

"There seems to be only George Maclean," she had sighed in a dismal way.

She was quite different from Elma, who continually dreamed of a duke.

George Maclean would do very well for Mabel, only, as Jean complained, "George Maclean is a gentleman and all that kind of thing, but he has no prospects." So they rather disposed of George Maclean, for immediate purposes at least. Then came Mr. Meredith. After that, in the language of the Leightons, it was all up with Mabel. She would simply have to get engaged and married to Mr. Meredith.

Mr. Meredith was of middle height, with rather a square, fair face, and a short cut-away dark moustache. He spoke in a bright concise sort of way, and darted very quick glances at people when addressing them. He came in with the Gardiners, and after shaking hands with Mrs. Leighton he darted several quick glances round the room, and then asked abruptly of Lucy Gardiner "Who was the tall girl in white?"

Here was the point where the fortunes of the Leighton girls became at last crystallized, concrete. It is all very well to dream, but it is much pleasanter to be sure that something is really about to happen.

None of this undercurrent was noticeable, however, in the general behaviour of that imaginative four. They began the evening in a dignified way with music. Every one either sang or played. Jean in her usual hearty fashion dashed through a "party piece." Even Elma was obliged to play the Boccherini Minuet, which she did with the usual nervous blunders.

As Dr. Harry placed the music ready for her, she whispered to him, "Whenever I lift my heels off the floor, my knees knock against each other."

"Keep your heels down," said Dr. Harry with the immobile air of a commanding officer.

Elma found the piano pedals, and in the fine desire to follow out Dr.

Harry's instructions played Boccherini with both pedals down throughout.

"How you do improve, Elma!" said May Turberville politely.

And Elma looked at her with a mute despair in her eyes of which hours of laughter could not rid them. If only they knew, those people in that room, if only they knew what she wanted to play, the melodies that came singing in her heart when she was happy, the minor things when she was sad! All she could do when people were collected to stare at her was to play the Boccherini Minuet exceedingly badly. The weight of "evenings"

had begun already to rest on Elma. Her undoubted gifts at learning and understanding music brought her into sharp prominence with her teachers and family, but never enabled Elma to exhibit herself with advantage on any real occasion.

It was all the more inexplicable that Mabel could at once dash into anything with abandon and perfect correctness. Technique and understanding seemed born in her. In the same way could she, light-heartedly and gracefully, take the new homage of Mr. Meredith, who made no secret of his interest in her from the first moment of entering the drawing-room. Mabel received him as she received a Sonata by Beethoven. With fleet fingers she could read the one as though she had practised it all her life; with dainty manners she seemed to comprehend Mr. Meredith from the start, as though she had been accustomed to refusing and accepting desirable husbands from time immemorial. It put her on a new footing with the rest of the girls. They felt in quite a decided way, within a few days even, that the old, rather childish fashion of talking about husbands was to be dropped, and that no jokes were to be perpetrated in regard to Mr. Meredith. It began to be no fun at all having an eligible sister in the house.

On this night, however, they were still children. About forty young people, school friends of themselves and Cuthbert, sustained that gaiety with which they had begun the afternoon. Even the musical part, where Mr. Leighton presided and encouraged young girls with no musical talents whatever to play and sing, pa.s.sed with a certain amount of lightness.

Before an interlude of charades, a strange girl was shown in. She giggled behind an enormous fan, and made a great show of canary-coloured curls in the process. She seemed to have on rather skimpy skirts, and she showed in a lumbering way rather large shiny patent shoes with flat boys' bows on them.

There was a moment of indecision before Betty broke out with the remark, "You might have had the sense to hide your feet, Lance."

The canary-coloured curls enabled Lance to look becomingly foolish. In any case, Mr. Leighton could not prevent the intellectual part of the evening from falling to bits. They had no more real music. Instead, they fell on Lance and borrowed his curls, and made some good charades till supper time.

"I can't help feeling very rocky about that supper," whispered Jean to Mabel. "Yet we've everything--sandwiches, cake, fruit and lemonade, tea and coffee. What can go wrong now?"