“That does not look much like it,” said Hatton, glancing at Lady Mabel, with L’Isle at her elbow.

“Let us go and beat about the bushes; we may start some thing worth chasing!”

The two friends, looking like a greyhound and a bull-terrier coupled together, proceeded to hunt in couple, by thrusting themselves into the cluster of gentlemen around Lady Mabel.  Hatton, with a little start of admiring surprise, praised the taste displayed in her dress, regretted her being so late in adopting it, it so became her.  He looked round, appealing to the bystanders, all of whom assented to his opinion, except the discriminating Goring, who asserted that it was not the costume which became Lady Mabel, but Lady Mabel who set off the costume, and he carried the popular voice with him.  “No head looks so well under a Turk’s turban as a Christian’s,” he continued, “and no native could show off the national dress here like a genuine English beauty.”  Lady Mabel had learned to listen complacently to the broadest language of admiration.

There were handsome women present—­for Elvas could boast its share of beauty—­but none to rival hers; the more conspicuous, too, from being loveliness of a different type, and not likely to be overlooked among the dumpy Portuguese ladies, few indeed of whom equaled her in height.  Lady Mabel would have been no woman had she not enjoyed the admiration she excited; but she remembered the business of the night, when Goring, bowing to L’Isle, spoke of the unexpected pleasure of seeing him here.

At once interrupting him, she exclaimed:  “It is probably the last time we shall have the pleasure of meeting our friends of Elvas, so I at least have come to devote myself exclusively to them.  Do, Colonel L’Isle, take pity on a dumb woman, and lend me a Portuguese tongue.”  And gliding off among a party of the natives present, she entered into conversation with them, calling continually on L’Isle to interlard her complimentary scraps with more copious and better turned periods.

Mrs. Shortridge, too, kept her interpreter, the commissary, close at her elbow, and the quantity of uncurrent Portuguese she made him utter to her guests, in the course of the night, amounted to a wholesale issue of the counterfeit coin of that tongue.  From the assiduity of both ladies in courting the natives, one might have thought that they meant to settle at Elvas, or that they were rival candidates canvassing the borough for votes.

It was a young and gay party assembled here, and Mrs. Shortridge’s floor was soon covered with dancers.  In private houses the national dances are often executed in a modified and less demonstrative style, at least early in the evening, than elsewhere.  Still the dancing in Elvas and Badajoz were near neighbors to each other.  But a change had come over Mrs. Shortridge, and now she made no protest, and saw little impropriety in displays which she had denounced a few days ago.