“Indeed?” said Constance.  “Annette, I think I’ll wear my black after all—­the black tulle, and my pearls.”

Annette unwillingly hung up the “creation.”

“You’d have looked a dream in it, my lady.  Why ever won’t you wear it?”

But Constance was obstinate.  And very soon she stood robed in clouds of black tulle and jet, from which her delicate neck and arms, and her golden-brown head stood out with brilliant effect.  Nora, still sitting on the bed, admired her hugely.  “She’ll look like that when she’s married,” she thought, by which she meant that the black had added a certain proud—­even a sombre—­stateliness to Connie’s good looks.

“Now my pearls, Annette.”

“Won’t you have some flowers, my lady?”

“No.  Not one.  Only my pearls.”

Annette brought them, from the locked dressing-case under her own bed where she jealously kept them.  They were famous pearls and many of them.  One string was presently wound in and out through the coils of hair that crowned the girl’s delicate head; the other string coiled twice round her neck and hung loose over the black dress.  They were her only ornament of any kind, but they were superb.

Connie looked at herself uneasily in the glass.

“I suppose I oughtn’t to wear them,” she said doubtfully.

“Why?” said Nora, staring with all her eyes.  “They’re lovely!”

“I suppose girls oughtn’t to wear such things.  I—­I never have worn them, since—­mamma’s death.”

“They belonged to her?”

“Of course.  And to papa’s mother.  She bought them in Rome.  It was said they belonged to Marie Antoinette.  Papa always believed they were looted at the sack of the Tuileries in the Revolution.”

Nora sat stupefied.  How strange that a girl like Connie should possess such things!—­and others, nothing!

“Are they worth a great deal of money?”

“Oh, yes, thousands,” said Connie, still looking at herself, in mingled vanity and discomfort.  “That’s why I oughtn’t to wear them.  But I shall wear them!” She straightened her tall figure imperiously.  “After all they were mamma’s.  I didn’t give them myself.”

* * * * *

Popular as the Marmion ball had been, the Magdalen ball on the following night was really the event of the week.  The beauty of its cloistered quadrangle, its river walks, its President’s garden, could not be rivalled elsewhere; and Magdalen men were both rich and lavish, so that the illuminations easily surpassed the more frugal efforts of other colleges.  The midsummer weather still held out, and for all the young creatures, plain and pretty, in their best dancing frocks, whom their brothers and cousins and friends were entertaining, this particular ball struck the top note of the week’s romance.

“Who is that girl in black!” said his partner to Douglas Falloden, as they paused to take breath after the first round of waltzing.  “And—­good heavens, what pearls!  Oh, they must be sham.  Who is she?”