“Oh, I’ll sit,” she said.  “Here’s the handkerchief!  You will fasten it so that it doesn’t flop, won’t you?  May I hold that case?  I won’t touch anything.”

He put it open into her lap.  “There is a chain of coral there.  Perhaps you can find it.  I think it would look well with your costume.”

Dinah pored over the jewels with sparkling eyes.  “But are you sure—­quite sure—­your sister doesn’t mind?”

“Quite sure,” said Scott, beginning to drape the handkerchief adroitly over her bent head.

“How very sweet of her—­of you both!” said Dinah.  “I feel like Cinderella being dressed for the ball.  Oh, what lovely pearls!  I never saw anything so exquisite.”

She had opened an inner case and was literally revelling in its contents.

“They were—­her husband’s wedding present to her,” said Scott in his rather monotonous voice.

“How lovely it must be to be married!” said Dinah, with a little sigh.

“Do you think so?” said Scott.

She turned in her chair to regard him.  “Don’t you?”

“I can’t quite imagine it,” he said.

“Oh, can’t I!” said Dinah.  “To have someone in love with you, wanting no one but you, thinking there’s no one else in the world like you.  Have you never dreamt that such a thing has happened?  I have.  And then waked up to find everything very flat and uninteresting.”

Scott was intent upon fastening an old gold brooch in the red kerchief above her forehead.  He did not meet the questioning of her bright eyes.

“No,” he said.  “I don’t think I ever cajoled myself, either waking or sleeping, into imagining that anybody would ever fall in love with me to that extent.”

Dinah laughed, her upturned face a-brim with merriment.  “If any woman ever wants to marry you, she’ll have to do her own proposing, won’t she?” she said.

“I think she will,” said Scott.

“I wish Rose de Vigne would fall in love with you then,” declared Dinah.  “Men are always proposing to her, she leads them on till they make perfect idiots of themselves.  I think it’s simply horrid of her to do it.  But she says she can’t help being beautiful.  Oh, how I wish—­” Dinah broke off.

“What do you wish?” said Scott.

She turned her face away to hide a blush.  “You must think me very silly and childish.  So I am, but I’m not generally so.  I think it’s in the air here.  I was going to say, how I wished I could outshine her for just one night!  Isn’t that piggy of me?  But I am so tired of being always in the shade.  She called me ‘Poor little Dinah!’ only to-night.  How would you like to be called that?”

“Most people call me Stumpy,” observed Scott, with his whimsical little smile.

“How rude of them!  How horrid of them!” said Dinah.  “And do you actually put up with it?”

He bent with her over the jewel-case, and picked out the coral chain.  “I don’t care the toss of a halfpenny,” he said.