A smile illumined softly the fine wrinkles round her eyes.  Beneath her lavender satin bodice, with strips of black velvet banding it at intervals, her heart was beating faster than usual.  She was thinking of a night in her youth, when her old playfellow, young Trefane of the Blues, danced with her nearly all the evening, and of how at her window she saw the sun rise, and gently wept because she was married to Horace Pendyce.

“I always feel sorry for a woman who can dance as she does.  I should have liked to have got some men from town, but Horace will only have the county people.  It’s not fair to the girls.  It isn’t so much their dancing, as their conversation—­all about the first meet, and yesterday’s cubbing, and to-morrow’s covert-shooting, and their fox-terriers (though I’m awfully fond of the dear dogs), and then that new golf course.  Really, it’s quite distressing to me at times.”  Again Mrs. Pendyce looked out into the room with her patient smile, and two little lines of wrinkles formed across her forehead between the regular arching of her eyebrows that were still dark-brown.  “They don’t seem able to be gay.  I feel they don’t really care about it.  They’re only just waiting till to-morrow morning, so that they can go out and kill something.  Even Bee’s like that!”

Mrs. Pendyce was not exaggerating.  The guests at Worsted Skeynes on the night of the Rutlandshire Handicap were nearly all county people, from the Hon. Gertrude Winlow, revolving like a faintly coloured statue, to young Tharp, with his clean face and his fair bullety head, who danced as though he were riding at a bullfinch.  In a niche old Lord Quarryman, the Master of the Gaddesdon, could be discerned in conversation with Sir James Malden and the Reverend Hussell Barter.

Mrs. Pendyce said: 

“Your husband and Lord Quarryman are talking of poachers; I can tell that by the look of their hands.  I can’t help sympathising a little with poachers.”

Lady Malden dropped her eyeglasses.

“James takes a very just view of them,” she said.  “It’s such an insidious offence.  The more insidious the offence the more important it is to check it.  It seems hard to punish people for stealing bread or turnips, though one must, of course; but I’ve no sympathy with poachers.  So many of them do it for sheer love of sport!”

Mrs. Pendyce answered: 

“That’s Captain Maydew dancing with her now.  He is a good dancer.  Don’t their steps fit?  Don’t they look happy?  I do like people to enjoy themselves!  There is such a dreadful lot of unnecessary sadness and suffering in the world.  I think it’s really all because people won’t make allowances for each other.”

Lady Malden looked at her sideways, pursing her lips; but Mrs. Pendyce, by race a Totteridge, continued to smile.  She had been born unconscious of her neighbours’ scrutinies.

“Helen Bellew,” she said, “was such a lovely girl.  Her grandfather was my mother’s cousin.  What does that make her?  Anyway, my cousin, Gregory Vigil, is her first cousin once removed—­the Hampshire Vigils.  Do you know him?”