The educational husband was standing so near Hilda that she got the very dregs of the glance of consternation his little wife gave him as she replied, a trifle red and stiff, that she was sure she would be delighted.

“Nobody suggests me!” exclaimed Captain Corby resentfully.  They were gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the Barberry’s glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered vehicle in Hilda’s hire.  It had an air of ludicrous forlornness, with its damaged paint and its tied-up harness.  Hilda, when its door closed upon the purple vision of her, might have been a modern Cinderella in mid-stage of backward transformation.

“I could chaperone you all!” she cried gaily back at them, as she passed down the steps; and in the relief of the general exclamation it seemed reasonable enough that Stephen Arnold should lean into the gharry to see that she was quite comfortable.  The unusual thing, which nobody else heard, was that he said to her then with shamed discomfort, “It doesn’t matter—­it doesn’t matter,” and that Hilda, driving away, found herself without a voice to answer the good-nights they chorussed after her.

Arnold begged a seat in Captain Corby’s dogcart, and Hilda, with her purple train in her lap, heard the wheels following all the way.  She re-encountered the lady to whom she had been entrusted, whose name it occurs to me was Winstick, in the cloakroom.  They were late; there was hardly anybody else but the attendants; and Mrs. Winstick smiled freely, and said she loved the colour of Hilda’s dress; also that she would give worlds for an invisible hairpin—­oh, thank you!—­and that it was simply ducky of her Excellency to have pink powder as well as white put out.  She did hope Miss Howe would enjoy the evening—­they would meet again later on; she must not forget to look at the chunam pillars in the ballroom—­perfectly lovely.  So she vanished; but Hilda went with certainty into the corridor to find Arnold pacing up and down the red strip of carpet, with his hands clasped behind him and his head thrust forward, waiting for her.

They dropped together into the crowd and walked among well-dressed women, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the pillared spaces of the ballroom.  People had not been asked to dance, and they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation.  There was, of course, the opportunity of talking and of listening to the band which discoursed in a corner behind palms, but the distraction which is the social Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the air, visibly increasing in the neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and made the commonplaces people uttered to each other disjointed and fragmentary, while it was plain that few were aware whether music was being rendered or not.  Anyone sensitive to pervading mental currents in gatherings of this sort would have found the relief of concentration and directness only near the buffet that ran along one side of the room, where the natural instinct played, without impediment, upon soup and sandwiches.