had an almost crude simplicity of insistence on fine feathers and gilding the obvious pride of life.  Yet he saw the little fair country girl near him look awe-struck, and he understood it.  For a fresh imagination, or for one that has, for some reason, a fresh sensitiveness of perception, the great gallery, the wealth of fair women, the scattered men in uniform, the solemn waiting for entrance into the royal presence, were enough.  And there really is a certain force in the too gaudy setting.  It blares like a trumpet.  It crushes the quiet and the repose of life.  It shines in the eye defiantly and suddenly, and at last it captures the mind and makes the breath come quickly, for, like no other and more perfect setting to life, it makes us think of death.  It is too bald an assertion of the world and all its works and all its pomps, not to challenge a rebuke from the grisly tyrant.

Edmund had not analysed these impressions, but he was still under their power when he turned to let others pass, for the crowd was thickening.  And as he did so, a little space was opened by three or four ladies turning round to secure places for some friends on the long seats against the walls.

Across this space he saw a woman, whom, for a moment only, he did not recognise.  It was a tall figure in white satin with a train of cloth of silver thrown over her arm.  There was nothing of the nervous debutante in the attitude, nor was there the half-truculent self-assertion of the modern girl.  When people talked afterwards of her gown and her jewels, Edmund only remembered the splendour of her pearls, and when he mentioned them, a woman added that the train had been lined with lace of untold value.  What he felt at the time was the enormous triumph of the eyes.  Grey eyes, full of light, full of pride.  He did not ask himself what was the excuse for this “haughty bearing,” and the old phrase, which has now sunk from court manners into penny novelettes, was the only phrase that seemed quite a true one.

Why did she stand so completely alone?  It made no difference to this sense of loneliness that she received warm greetings in the crowd, or that Lady Dawning was fidgeting and maternal.  Evidently (and he was amused at the combination) she was going to present her cousin, John Dexter’s daughter.  Did she remember now how she had advised Mrs. Carteret to hide Molly from the public eye?

But Molly’s figure was always to remain in his mind thus triumphant without absurdity, and thus alone in a crowd.  The blackness of her hair had a strange force from the white transparent veil flowing over it, and a flush of deep colour was in the dark skin.  Edmund had several moments in which to look at her and to realise that Molly was walking in a dream of greatness.  The little country girl he had seen just now had been brought up to hear kindly jokes about Courts and their ways; not so Molly.  To her it was all intensely serious and intensely exciting.  Could he have known the chief cause of the intense emotion that filled Molly’s slight figure with a feverish vitality would he have believed that she was happy?  And yet she was, for no pirate king running his brig under the very nose of a man-of-war ever had more of the quintessence of the sense of adventure than Molly had, as Lady Dawning led her, the heiress of the year, into the long gallery.