While this merry badinage was going on, the young people crowding the closer so as not to lose a word, or making room for the constant stream of fresh arrivals on their way toward the dressing-rooms above, their eyes now and then searching the top of the stairs in the hope of getting the first glimpse of Kate, our heroine was receiving the final touches from her old black mammy.  It took many minutes.  The curl must be adjusted, the full skirts pulled out or shaken loose, the rare jewels arranged before she was dismissed with—­“Dah, honey chile, now go-long.  Ain’t nary one on ’em ain’t pizen hongry for ye—­any mos’ on ’em ’ll drown derselves ‘fo’ mawnin’ becos dey can’t git ye.”

She is ready now, Harry beside her, her lace scarf embroidered with pink rosebuds floating from her lovely shoulders, her satin skirt held firmly in both hands that she might step the freer, her dainty silk stockings with the ribbons crossed about her ankles showing below its edge.

But it was the colonel who took possession of her when she reached the floor of the great hall, and not her father nor her lover.

“No, Harry—­stand aside, sir.  Out with you!  Kate goes in with me!  Seymour, please give your arm to Mrs. Rutter.”  And with the manner of a courtier leading a princess into the presence of her sovereign, the Lord of Moorlands swept our Lady of Kennedy Square into the brilliant drawing-room crowded with guests.

It was a great ball and it was a great ballroom—­in spaciousness, color, and appointments.  No one had ever dreamed of its possibilities before, although everybody knew it was the largest in the county.  The gentle hostess, with old Alec as head of the pulling-out-and-moving-off department, had wrought the change.  All the chairs, tables, sofas, and screens, little and big, had either been spirited away or pushed back against the wall for tired dancers.  Over the wide floor was stretched a linen crash; from the ceiling and bracketed against the white walls, relieved here and there by long silken curtains of gold-yellow, blazed clusters of candles, looking for all the world like so many bursting sky-rockets, while at one end, behind a mass of flowering plants, sat a quartette of musicians, led by an old darky with a cotton-batting head, who had come all the way from Philadelphia a-purpose.

Nor had the inner man been forgotten:  bowls of hot apple toddy steamed away in the dining-room; bowls of eggnog frothed away in the library; ladlings of punch, and the contents of several old cut-glass decanters, flanked by companies of pipe-stem glasses, were being served in the dressing-rooms; while relays of hot terrapin, canvas-back duck, sizzling hot; olio, cold joints; together with every conceivable treatment and condition of oysters—­in scallop shells, on silver platters and in wooden plates—­raw, roasted, fried, broiled, baked, and stewed—­everything in fact that could carry out the colonel’s watchword, “Eat, drink, and be merry,” were within the beck and call of each and every guest.