He took her back to the dancing-room.  Mary walked beside him with a dull, fierce sense of wrong.  It was Kitty, of course, who had done it—­Kitty who had taken him away from her.

“That’s finished,” said Cliffe to himself, with a long breath of relief, as he delivered her into the hands of her partner.  “Now for the other!”

* * * * *

Thenceforward, no one saw Kitty and no one danced with her.  She spent her time in beflowered corners, or remote drawing-rooms, with Geoffrey Cliffe.  Ashe heard her voice in the distance once or twice, answering a voice he detested; he looked into the supper-room with a lady on his arm, and across it he saw Kitty, with her white elbow on the table and her hand propping a face that was turned—­half mocking and yet wholly absorbed—­to Cliffe.  He saw her flitting across vistas or disappearing through far doorways, but always with that sinister figure in attendance.

His mind was divided between a secret fury—­roused in him by the pride of a man of high birth and position, who has always had the world at command, and now sees an impertinence offered him which he does not know how to punish—­and a mood of irony.  Cliffe’s persecution of Kitty was a piece of confounded bad manners.  But to look at it with the round, hypocritical eyes some of these people were bringing to bear on it was really too much!  Let them look to their own affairs—­they needed it.

At last the party broke up.  Kitty touched him on the shoulder as he was standing on the stairs, apparently absorbed in a teasing skirmish with a charming child in her first season, who thought him the most delightful of men.

“I’m ready, William.”

He turned sharply, and saw that she was alone.

“Come along, then!  In five minutes more I should have been asleep on the stairs.”

They descended.  Kitty went for her cloak.  Ashe sent for the carriage.  As he was standing on the steps Cliffe pushed past him and called for a hansom.  It came in the rear of two or three carriages already under the portico.  He ran along the pavement and jumped in.  The doors were just being shut by the linkman when a little figure in a white cloak flew down the steps of the house and held up a hand to the driver of the hansom.

“Do you see that?” said Lady Parham, in a voice of suppressed but contemptuous amazement, as she turned to Mary Lyster, who was driving home with her.  “Call my carriage, please!” she said, imperiously, to one of the footmen at the door.  Her carriage, as it happened, was immediately behind the hansom; but the hansom could not move because of the small lady who had jumped upon the step and was leaning eagerly forward.

There was a clamor of shouting voices:  “Move on, cabby!  Move on!” “Stand clear, ma’am, please,” said the driver, while Cliffe opened the door of the cab, and seemed about to jump down again.

“Who is it?” said an impatient judge behind Lady Parham.  “What’s the matter?”