Everything to-night oppressed her.  The lights dazzled her with what seemed to her their hard and cruel shine; the passing dancers radiantly clad and joyous made her giddy and contemptuous; the flower-scents pouring through the room from the plants within and from the gardens without gave her headache; the number of people at the ball—­people whom she did not know and who stared at her, people whom she did know and who talked to her—­all overwhelmed as well as isolated her.  She seemed to belong to no one, now that Edgar had let her slip from his hands so coldly—­not even to Mrs. Corfield, who had brought her, nor yet to her faithful friend and guardian Alick, who wandered round and round about her in circles like a dog, doing his best to make her feel befriended and to clear her dear face of some of its sadness.  Doing his best too, with characteristic unselfishness, to forget that he loved her if it displeased her, and to convince her that he had only dreamed when he had said those rash words when the lilacs were first budding in the garden at Steel’s Corner.

It was quite early in the evening when Edgar danced this uninteresting “square” with Leam, whom then he ceremoniously handed back to Mrs. Corfield, as if this gathering of friends and neighbors in the country had been a formal assemblage of strangers in a town.

“I hope you are not tired with this quadrille,” he said as he took her across the room, not looking at her.

“It was dull, but I am not tired,” Learn answered, not looking at him.

“I am sorry I was such an uninteresting partner,” was his rejoinder, made with mock simplicity.

“A dumb man who does not even talk on his fingers cannot be very amusing,” returned Learn with real directness.

“You were dumb too:  why did you not talk, if dull, on your fingers?” he asked.

She drew herself up proudly, more like the Leam of Alick than of Edgar.  “I do not generally amuse gentlemen,” she said.

“Then I am only in the majority?” with that forced smile which was his way when he was most annoyed.

“You have been to-day,” answered Leam, quitting his arm as they came up to her sharp-featured chaperon, but looking straight at him as she spoke with those heart-breaking eyes to which, Edgar thought, everything must yield, and he himself at the last.

Not minded, however, to yield at this moment, fighting indeed desperately with himself not to yield at all, Edgar kept away from his sister’s step-daughter still more, as if a quarrel had fallen between them; and Adelaide gained in proportion, for suddenly that butterfly, undecided fancy of his seemed to settle on the rector’s daughter, to whom he now paid more court than to the whole room beside—­court so excessive and so patent that it made the families laugh knowingly, and say among themselves evidently the Hill would soon receive its new mistress, and the rector knew which way things were going when he made that wedding-speech this morning.