Falloden gaily declared that he would back his cousin Mary Tamworth to get anything she wanted.  Mrs. Glendower threw him a sudden, sharp look.  Then she was swept into the crowd.  A couple of men in brilliant uniform came by, clearing a space in the centre of the room, and Falloden saw Lady Alice beckoning.

In another minute or two he and she were in their places, and what the newspapers who record these things call “a brilliant scene” was in full tide:—­the Prince and Princess dancing with the master and mistress of the house, and the rest of the quadrille made up of the tallest men and handsomest women that Lady Tamworth, with a proper respect both to rank and to looks, had been able to collect.

The six-foot-three Falloden and his fairylike partner were much observed, and Lady Alice bubbling over with fun and spirits, found her cousin Douglas, whom in general she disliked, far better company than usual.  As for him, he was only really conscious of one face and form in the stately dance itself, or in the glittering crowd which was eagerly looking on.  Constance Bledlow, in filmy white, was his vis-a-vis.  He saw her quick movement as she perceived him.  Then she bowed slightly, he ceremoniously.  Their hands touched at intervals, and not a few of the spectators noticed these momentary contacts with a thrill of pleasure—­the splendid physique of the young man, the flowerlike grace of the girl.  Once or twice, as they stood together in the centre of the “chain,” a few words would have been possible.  But Constance never spoke, nor did Falloden.  He had thought her very pale at first sight.  But her cheek flushed with dancing; and with every minute that passed she seemed to him more lovely and more remote, like a spirit from another world, into which he could not pass.

“Isn’t she pretty!—­Connie Bledlow?” said Lady Alice enthusiastically.  “She’s having a great success.  Of course other people are much handsomer, but there’s something—­”

Yes, there was something!—­and something which, like an exquisite fluttering bird, had just escaped from Douglas Falloden, and would now, he supposed, forever escape him.

When the quadrille was over he watched her delicate whiteness disappear amid the uniforms, the jewels, and the festoons or roses hanging across the ballroom.  The barbaric, overdecorated scene, with all its suggestions of a luxurious and self-confident world, where every one was rich and privileged, or hunting riches and privilege—­a world without the smallest foreboding of change, the smallest doubt of its own right to exist—­forced upon him by contrast the recollection of the hour he had just spent with Mr. Gregory in his father’s dusty dismantled library.  He and his were, it seemed, “ruined”—­as many people here already guessed.  He looked at the full-length Van Dycks on the wall of the Tamworths’ ballroom, and thought, not without a grim leap of humour, that he would be acting showman and auctioneer, within a few days perhaps, to his father’s possessions of the same kind.