In the next room Stella found Romayne.  He looked careworn and irritable, but brightened directly when she approached him.

“My mother has been speaking to you,” she said.  “I am afraid—­”

He stopped her there.  “She is your mother,” he interposed, kindly.  “Don’t think that I am ungrateful enough to forget that.”

She took his arm, and looked at him with all her heart in her eyes.  “Come into a quieter room,” she whispered.

Romayne led her away.  Neither of them noticed Penrose as they left the room.

He had not moved since Stella had spoken to him.  There he remained in his corner, absorbed in thought—­and not in happy thought, as his face would have plainly betrayed to any one who had cared to look at him.  His eyes sadly followed the retiring figures of Stella and Romayne.  The color rose on his haggard cheeks.  Like most men who are accustomed to live alone, he had the habit, when he was strongly excited, of speaking to himself.  “No,” he said, as the unacknowledged lovers disappeared through the door, “it is an insult to ask me to do it!” He turned the other way, escaped Lady Loring’s notice in the reception-room, and left the house.

Romayne and Stella passed through the card-room and the chess-room, turned into a corridor, and entered the conservatory.

For the first time the place was a solitude.  The air of a newly-invented dance, faintly audible through the open windows of the ballroom above, had proved an irresistible temptation.  Those who knew the dance were eager to exhibit themselves.  Those who had only heard of it were equally anxious to look on and learn.  Even toward the latter end of the nineteenth century the youths and maidens of Society can still be in earnest—­when the object in view is a new dance.

What would Major Hynd have said if he had seen Romayne turn into one of the recesses of the conservatory, in which there was a seat which just held two?  But the Major had forgotten his years and his family, and he too was one of the spectators in the ballroom.

“I wonder,” said Stella, “whether you know how I feel those kind words of yours when you spoke of my mother.  Shall I tell you?”

She put her arm round his neck and kissed him.  He was a man new to love, in the nobler sense of the word.  The exquisite softness in the touch of her lips, the delicious fragrance of her breath, intoxicated him.  Again and again he returned the kiss.  She drew back; she recovered her self-possession with a suddenness and a certainty incomprehensible to a man.  From the depths of tenderness she passed to the shallows of frivolity.  In her own defense she was almost as superficial as her mother, in less than a moment.

“What would Mr. Penrose say if he saw you?” she whispered.

“Why do you speak of Penrose?  Have you seen him to-night?”

“Yes—­looking sadly out of his element, poor man.  I did my best to set him at his ease—­because I know you like him.”