From the opposite side of the room someone was coming towards them, and, seeing him, Rosy smiled in welcome.

“I am sure Lord Mount Dunstan is coming to ask you to dance with him,” she said.  “Why have you not danced with him before, Betty?”

“He has not asked me,” Betty answered.  “That is the only reason.”

“Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt called at the Mount a few days after they met him at Stornham,” Rosalie explained in an undertone.  “They wanted to know him.  Then it seems they found they liked each other.  Lady Dunholm has been telling me about it.  She says Lord Dunholm thanks you, because you said something illuminating.  That was the word she used—­’illuminating.’  I believe you are always illuminating, Betty.”

Mount Dunstan was certainly coming to them.  How broad his shoulders looked in his close-fitting black coat, how well built his whole strong body was, and how steadily he held his eyes!  Here and there one sees a man or woman who is, through some trick of fate, by nature a compelling thing unconsciously demanding that one should submit to some domineering attraction.  One does not call it domineering, but it is so.  This special creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her single share of force.  Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as this “other one” came to her.  He did not use the ballroom formula when he spoke to her.  He said in rather a low voice: 

“Will you dance with me?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Lord Dunholm and his wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable a pair had never before danced together in their ballroom.  Certainly no pair had ever been watched with quite the same interested curiosity.  Some onlookers thought it singular that they should dance together at all, some pleased themselves by reflecting on the fact that no other two could have represented with such picturesqueness the opposite poles of fate and circumstance.  No one attempted to deny that they were an extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one’s eyes followed them in spite of one’s self.

“Taken together they produce an effect that is somehow rather amazing,” old Lady Alanby commented.  “He is a magnificently built man, you know, and she is a magnificently built girl.  Everybody should look like that.  My impression would be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that neither of them had any particular character.  That affair of the apple was so silly.  Eve has always struck me as being the kind of woman who, if she lived to-day, would run up stupid bills at her dressmakers and be afraid to tell her husband.  That wonderful black head of Miss Vanderpoel’s looks very nice poised near Mount Dunstan’s dark red one.”

“I am glad to be dancing with him,” Betty was thinking.  “I am glad to be near him.”

“Will you dance this with me to the very end,” asked Mount Dunstan—­“to the very late note?”

“Yes,” answered Betty.