Marcella passed along on Aldous’s arm, conscious that people were streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that every eye was fixed upon her and her mother.  “Look, there she is,” she heard in an excited girl’s voice as they passed Lord Maxwell’s library, now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest.  “Come, quick!  There—­I told you she was lovely!”

Every now and then some old friend, man or woman, rose smiling from the seats along the side, and Aldous introduced his bride.

“On her dignity!” said an old hunting squire to his daughter when they had passed.  “Shy, no doubt—­very natural!  But nowadays girls, when they’re shy, don’t giggle and blush as they used to in my young days; they look as if you meant to insult them, and they weren’t going to allow it!  Oh, very handsome—­very handsome—­of course.  But you can see she’s advanced—­peculiar—­or what d’ye call it?—­woman’s rights, I suppose, and all that kind of thing?  Like to see you go in for it, Nettie, eh!”

“She’s awfully handsome,” sighed his pink-cheeked, insignificant little daughter, still craning her neck to look—­“very simply dressed too, except for those lovely pearls.  She does her hair very oddly, so low down—­in those plaits.  Nobody does it like that nowadays.”

“That’s because nobody has such a head,” said her brother, a young Hussar lieutenant, beside her, in the tone of connoisseurship.  “By George, she’s ripping—­she’s the best-looking girl I’ve seen for a good long time.  But she’s a Tartar, I’ll swear—­looks it, anyway.”

“Every one says she has the most extraordinary opinions,” said the girl, eagerly.  “She’ll manage him, don’t you think?  I’m sure he’s very meek and mild.”

“Don’t know that,” said the young man, twisting his moustache with the air of exhaustive information.  “Raeburn’s a very good fellow—­excellent fellow—­see him shooting, you know—­that kind of thing.  I expect he’s got a will when he wants it.  The mother’s handsome, too, and looks a lady.  The father’s kept out of the way, I see.  Rather a blessing for the Raeburns.  Can’t be pleasant, you know, to get a man like that in the family.  Look after your spoons—­that kind of thing.”

Meanwhile Marcella was standing beside Miss Raeburn, at the head of the long ball-room, and doing her best to behave prettily.  One after another she bowed to, or shook hands with, half the magnates of the county—­the men in pink, the women in the new London dresses, for which this brilliant and long-expected ball had given so welcome an excuse.  They knew little or nothing of her, except that she was clearly good-looking, that she was that fellow Dick Boyce’s daughter and was reported to be “odd.”  Some, mostly men, who said their conventional few words to her, felt an amused admiration for the skill and rapidity with which she had captured the parti of the county; some, mostly women, were already jealous of her.  A few of the older people here and there, both men and women—­but after all they shook hands like the rest!—­knew perfectly well that the girl must be going through an ordeal, were touched by the signs of thought and storm in the face, and looked back at her with kind eyes.