Be pleased to preserve your confidence in me, and to give me time—­and I answer for the result.

BOOK THE SECOND.

CHAPTER I.

THE SANDWICH DANCE.

A FINE spring, after a winter of unusual severity, promised well for the prospects of the London season.

Among the social entertainments of the time, general curiosity was excited, in the little sphere which absurdly describes itself under the big name of Society, by the announcement of a party to be given by Lady Loring, bearing the quaint title of a Sandwich Dance.  The invitations were issued at an unusually early hour; and it was understood that nothing so solid and so commonplace as the customary supper was to be offered to the guests.  In a word, Lady Loring’s ball was designed as a bold protest against late hours and heavy midnight meals.  The younger people were all in favor of the proposed reform.  Their elders declined to give an opinion beforehand.

In the small inner circle of Lady Loring’s most intimate friends, it was whispered that an innovation in the matter of refreshments was contemplated, which would put the tolerant principles of the guests to a severe test.  Miss Notman, the housekeeper, politely threatening retirement on a small annuity, since the memorable affair of the oyster-omelet, decided on carrying out her design when she heard that there was to be no supper.  “My attachment to the family can bear a great deal,” she said.  “But when Lady Loring deliberately gives a ball, without a supper, I must hide my head somewhere—­and it had better be out of the house!” Taking Miss Notman as representative of a class, the reception of the coming experiment looked, to say the least of it, doubtful.

On the appointed evening, the guests made one agreeable discovery when they entered the reception rooms.  They were left perfectly free to amuse themselves as they liked.

The drawing-rooms were given up to dancing; the picture gallery was devoted to chamber music.  Chess-players and card-players found remote and quiet rooms especially prepared for them.  People who cared for nothing but talking were accommodated to perfection in a sphere of their own.  And lovers (in earnest or not in earnest) discovered, in a dimly-lighted conservatory with many recesses, that ideal of discreet retirement which combines solitude and society under one roof.

But the ordering of the refreshments failed, as had been foreseen, to share in the approval conferred on the arrangement of the rooms.  The first impression was unfavorable.  Lady Loring, however, knew enough of human nature to leave results to two potent allies—­experience and time.