“Lucia,” he said, “I shall be obliged to give up my quadrille.  It is a great nuisance; but keep the next for me, will you not?”

She nodded and smiled, and he hurried off.

Mr. Percy still stood undecided.  His cousin touched him on the shoulder, “Are not you going to dance?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” with the slightest possible shrug.  “Miss Costello, if you are disengaged, will you dance this quadrille with me?”

Lucia turned when he spoke.  The same deep crimson flush came to her face as when their eyes had first met that morning.  She felt angry with him for asking her, and with Maurice for having left her free.  She longed to say to him some of the civil impertinences women can use to men they dislike, but she was too great a novice, and found no better expedient than to accept the invitation as coolly as it was given.  Probably, however, Mr. Percy attributed her blush to a cause very different from its real one; or else there was something soothing and agreeable in finding himself in possession of incomparably the prettiest partner in the room, for he began almost immediately to feel less bored, and positively roused himself to the extent of making some exertion to please his reluctant companion.

Now, it was all very well for Lucia to be cross, and to nurse her crossness to the last possible minute, but a girl of sixteen, however pretty and however spoiled, is not generally gifted with sufficient strength of mind or badness of temper, to remain quite insensible to the good qualities of a handsome man, who evidently wishes to make himself agreeable to her.  When the man in question is the lion of the day, probably his success becomes inevitable; at all events, Lucia gradually recovered her good humour, and kept up her part of the broken chat possible under the circumstances, with enough grace and spirit to give to her extraordinary beauty the last crowning charm which Percy had not, until then, found in it.

Thus they finished their quadrille in good humour with each other, but as they left their place to rejoin Mrs. Bellairs, Maurice Leigh came into the room by a side door.  The sight of him reminded Mr. Percy of the short dialogue he had heard.

“You are engaged for the next quadrille, are you not?” he asked Lucia.

“Yes, to Maurice.  I promised it to him instead of the first.”

“You were to have danced this one with him, then?”

She laughed.  “It is a childish arrangement of ours,” she said; “we agreed, long ago, always to dance the first quadrille together, and everybody knows of it, so no one asks me for that.”

“I wonder at his being willing to miss his privilege to-night; you must be very indulgent, not to punish him.”

“Oh! you know he is acting as a kind of steward to-night and has so many things to do.  It was not his fault.”

“And you would have waited patiently for him?”

“Patiently?  I don’t know.  Certainly I should have waited, for no one but a stranger would have asked me to dance.”