She stopped at once.  “If you knew what you were talking about; I’d never speak to you again.  But because I was fool enough once to believe that Derry Drake was a coward, I am going to forgive you.  But I shall not dance with you again; ever—­”

Making her way back alone to the box, she saw with a throb of relief that her father had joined Emily and Marion Gray.

He uttered a quick exclamation as she came up.  “What’s the matter, daughter?”

Her throat was dry.  “I can’t tell you now—­there are too many people.  It was Ralph.  I hate him, Daddy.”

“My dear—­”

“I do.”

“But why?”

“Please, I don’t want to talk about it—­wait until we get home.”

Looking out over the heads of the swaying crowd, she saw that Derry was dancing with Alma Drew.  And it was Alma who had said at the Witherspoon dinner, “Everybody will forgive a man with money.”

And that was what Ralph had thought of her, that she was like Alma—­that money could buy her—­that she would sell the honor of her country for gold—.

But worse than any hurt of her own was the hurt of the thing for Derry.  Ralph Witherspoon had dared to point a finger of scorn at him—­other people had dared—­

She suffered intensely, not as a child, but as a woman.

Alma, out on the floor, was saying to Derry, “I saw you dancing with Jean McKenzie.  She’s a quaint little duck.”

“Not a duck, Alma,” he was smiling, “a white dove—­or a silver swan.”  The look that he sent across the room to Jean was a revelation.

Like Ralph, she grew hateful.  “So that’s it?  Well, a man with money can get anything.”

He had no anger for her.  Jean might blaze in his defense, but his own fires were not to be fanned by any words of Alma Drew.  If he lost his fortune, Jean would still care for him.  It was fore-ordained, as fixed as the stars.

So he went back to her, and when she saw him coming, the burden of her distress fell from her.  The world became once more hers and Derry’s, with everybody else shut out.  When they had supper with the Witherspoon party joining them, and Ralph palely repentant beside her, she even, to the utter bewilderment of her father, smiled at him, and talked as if their quarrel had never been.

Drusilla watched her with more than a tinge of envy.  She was aware that her own vivid charm was shadowed and eclipsed by the white flame of Jean’s youth and innocence.  “And he loves her,” she thought with a tug of her heartstrings; “he loves her, and there’ll never be anything like it for him again.”

She sat rather silently between Captain Hewes and Dr. McKenzie.  Dr. McKenzie had always admired Drusilla, but tonight his attention was rather more than usual fixed upon her by a remark which Captain Hewes had made when the two men had stood alone together watching the dancers.  “I have seen very little of American women—­but to me Drusilla Gray seems the supreme type.”