Maryllia turned white as a snowdrop—­but her eyes blazed with sudden amazement, indignation and pride that made lightning in their tender blue.  Then,—­deliberately choosing a cigarette from the silver box which had been placed on the table before her, she lit it,—­and began to puff the smoke from her rosy lips in delicate rings, turning to Lord Roxmouth as she did so with a playful word and smile.  It was enough;—­the ‘lead’ was given.  A glance of approval went the round of her London lady guests—­who, exonerated by her prompt action from all responsibility, lighted their cigarettes without further ado, and the room was soon misty with tobacco fumes.  Not a word was addressed to Walden,—­a sudden mantle of fog seemed to have fallen over him, covering him up from the consciousness of the company, for no one even glanced at him, except covertly,—­no one appeared to have heard or noticed his remark.  Lord Charlemont looked, as he felt, distressed.  In his heart he admired Walden for his boldness in speaking out frankly against a modern habit of women which he also considered reprehensible,—­but at the same time he recognised that the reproof had perhaps been administered too openly.  Walden himself sat rigid and very pale—­he fully realised what he had done,—­and he knew he was being snubbed for it—­but he did not care.

“Better so!”—­he said to himself in an inward rage—­“Better that I should never see her again than see her as she is now!  She wrongs herself!—­and I cannot be a silent witness of her wrong, even though it is wrought by her own hand!”

The buzz of talk now grew more loud and incessant;—­he saw Sir Morton Pippitt’s round eyes fixed upon him with an astonished and derisive stare,—­and he longed for the moment to come when he might escape from the whole smoking, chattering party.  All that his own eyes consciously beheld was Maryllia—­Maryllia, the dainty, pretty, delicate feminine creature who seemed created out of the finest mortal and spiritual essences,—­smoking!  That cigarette stuck in her pretty mouth, vulgarised her appearance at once,—­coarsened her—­ made her look as if she were indeed the rapid ‘Maryllia Van’ his friend Bishop Brent had written of.  What did he care if not a soul at that table ever spoke to him again?  Nothing!  But he cared—­oh, he cared greatly for any roughening touch on that little figure of smooth white and rose flesh, which somehow he had, unconsciously to himself, set in a niche for thoughts higher than common!  He was quite aware that he had committed a social error, yet he was sorry she could not have reproved him in some other fashion than that of deliberately doing what he had just condemned as unbecoming to a lady.  And his mind was in a whirl, when at last she rose to give the signal to adjourn, passing out of the dining-room without a glance in his direction.

The moment she had vanished, he at once prepared to leave, not only the room, but the house.  No one offered to detain him.  The men were all too conscious of what they considered his ’faux pas’—­and they were also made rather uncomfortable by the decided rebuff he had received from their hostess.  Yet they all liked him, and were, in their way, sorry for what had occurred.  Lord Roxmouth, with the easy assurance of one who is conscious of his own position, remarked with kindly banter:—­