She closed her eyes quickly, and he watched the beautiful lashes lying still upon her cheek.  With an emotion he could not explain—­for it was not an emotion of the senses, just as her yielding had not been a yielding of the senses but a yielding of the soul—­he continued to hold her in his arms, her life, her will given to him wholly, sighed out upon his heart.

* * * * *

Then gradually she recovered her balance; the normal Kitty came back.  She put out her hand and touched his face.

“You must go back to the House, William.”

“Yes, if you are all right.”

She sat up, and began to rearrange some of her hair that had slipped down.

“You have carried us both into such heights and depths, darling!” said Ashe, after he had watched her a little in silence, “that I have forgotten to tell you the gossip I brought back from mother this morning.”

Kitty paused, interrogatively.  She was still pale.

“Do you know that mother is convinced Mary Lyster has made up her mind to marry Cliffe?”

There was a pause, then Kitty said, with incredulous contempt:  “He would never dream of marrying her!”

“Not so sure!  She has a great deal of money, and Cliffe wants money badly.”

Ashe began to put his papers together.  Kitty questioned him a little more, intermittently, as to what his mother had said.  When he had left her, she sat for long on the sofa, playing with some flowers she had taken from her dress, or sombrely watching the child, as it lay on the floor beside her.

X

“My lady!  It’s come!”

The maid put her head in just to convey the good news.  Kitty was in her bedroom walking up and down in a fury which was now almost speechless.

The housemaid was waiting on the stairs.  The butler was waiting in the hall.  Till that hurried knock was heard at the front door, and the much-tried Wilson had rushed to open it, the house had been wrapped in a sort of storm silence.  It was ten o’clock on the night of the ball.  Half Kitty’s costume lay spread out upon her bed.  The other half—­although since seven o’clock all Kitty’s servants had been employed in rushing to Fanchette’s establishment in New Bond Street, at half-hour intervals, in the fastest hansoms to be found—­had not yet appeared.

However, here at last was the end of despair.  A panting boy dragged the box into the hall, the butler and footman carried it up-stairs and into their mistress’s room, where Kitty in a white peignoir stood waiting, with the brow of Medea.

“The boy that brought it looked just fit to drop, my lady!” said the maid, as she undid the box.  She was a zealous servant, but she was glad sometimes to chasten these great ones of the land by insisting on the seamy side of their pleasures.

Kitty paused in the eager task of superintendence, and turned to the under-housemaid, who stood by, gazing open-mouthed at the splendors emerging from the box.