It was almost like a scene at a ball, the great white-and-gold music room before dinner that night.  The Burnett family proper numbered fifteen among themselves, and there were nearly thirty guests added.  It was entirely too large a house party to have handled successfully for very long, but it would be most awfully jolly for three or four days; and now, when the whole crowd were gathered waiting for dinner, the picture was one of such bubbling joy that Jack’s very heavy heart seemed to himself to be terribly out of place there and he wondered whether he should be able to put up even a fairly presentable front during the endless hours that must ensue before the time for breaking up arrived.

Burnett took him all around and introduced him to people in general, and people in general seemed to him to merely bring the fact of her pre-eminence more vividly than ever before his mind.  He found himself looking everywhere but at them too, and listening with an acutely sensitive ear for sounds quite other than those of their various lips.  But eternal disappointment rewarded his eyes and ears.  She was nowhere.

So he talked blindly about nothing to all the nobodies and laughed stupidly over all their stupidities until—­suddenly and without any warning—­a fearful jump in his throat sent the mercury in his constitution shooting up to 160, and he saw, heard, felt, gasped, and knew, that that radiant angel in silver tissue who had just entered the farther end of the room was indubitably Herself.

(Married!)

He quite forgot who, what and where he was.  There was a somebody talking to him—­a very awful and bony young lady, but she faded so completely out of the general scheme of his immediate present that all the use he made of her was to stare over her head at the distant apparition that was become, now and forever, his All in All.  The distant apparition had not lied when she had told him up in her brother’s room that she too, looked “nice” when dressed for dinner.  Only the word “nice” was as watered milk to the champagne of her appearance.  She was gowned superbly and her throat and arms were half bared by the folds of silvered lace; her hair fitted into the back of her neck in the smoothest mass of puffs and coils, and the curl on her forehead was more distracting than ever.

(Married!)

She seemed to be speaking to everyone, and everyone seemed to be crowding around her.  He couldn’t go up like everyone else, because the awful and bony young lady was talking hard at him and heightened her charms with a smile that took up two-fifths of her face, and wrinkled all the rest.

Her name was Lome—­Maude Lome.  He knew that she must be a relative without being told, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been invited at all.  Anyone could divine that.

“Oh, isn’t dear Betty just lovely?” this fearful freak said.  “I think she’s just too lovely for anything!  She’s my cousin, you know; we’re often mistaken for one another.”