The glass door closed behind her.  She burst impetuously into the deserted ballroom.  And here, on the point of entering the small recess from which she was escaping, she came suddenly face to face with Scott.

So headlong was her flight that she actually ran into him.  He put out a steadying hand.

“I was just coming to look for you,” he said in his quiet, composed fashion.

She stopped unwillingly.  “Oh, were you?  How kind!  I—­I think I ought to go up now.  It’s getting late, isn’t it?  Good-night!”

He did not seek to detain her.  She wondered with a burning sense of shame what he could have thought of her wild rush.  But she was too agitated to attempt any excuse, too agitated to check her retreat.  Without a backward glance she hastened away like Cinderella overtaken by fate; the spell was broken, the glamour gone.

CHAPTER VIII

MR. GREATHEART

It was a very meek and subdued Dinah who made her appearance in the salle-a-manger on the following morning.

She and Billy were generally in the best of spirits, and the room usually rang with their young laughter.  But that morning even Billy was decorously quiet, and his sister scarcely spoke or raised her eyes.

Colonel de Vigne, white-moustached and martial, sat at the table with them, but neither Lady Grace nor Rose was present.  The Colonel’s face was stern.  He occupied himself with letters with scarcely so much as a glance for the boy and girl on either side of him.

There was a letter by Dinah’s plate also, but she had not opened it.  Her downcast face was very pale.  She ate but little, and that little only when urged thereto by Billy, whose appetite was rampant notwithstanding the decorum of his behaviour.

Scott, breakfasting with his brother at a table only a few yards distant, observed the trio with unobtrusive interest.

He had made acquaintance with the Colonel on the previous evening, and after a time the latter caught his eye and threw him a brief greeting.  Most people were polite to Scott.  But the Colonel’s whole aspect was forbidding that morning, and his courtesy went no further.

Sir Eustace did not display the smallest interest in anyone.  His black brows were drawn, and he looked even more haughtily unapproachable than the Colonel.

He conversed with his brother in low tones on the subject of the morning’s mail which lay at Scott’s elbow and which he was investigating while he ate.  Now and then he gave concise and somewhat peremptory instructions, which Scott jotted down in a note-book with business-like rapidity.  No casual observer would have taken them for brothers that morning.  They were employer and secretary.

Only when the last letter had been discussed and laid aside did the elder abruptly abandon his aloof attitude to ask a question upon a more intimate matter.