“I was just going to look for you,” he said to his wife—­“There are dozens of people waiting to be presented to Miss Armitage; the Duchess has asked for her several times.”

Lady Blythe turned to Innocent with a dazzling smile.

“How guilty I feel!” she exclaimed.  “Everybody wanting to see you, and I selfishly detaining you in the garden!  It was so good of you to give me a few minutes!—­you, the guest of the evening too!  Good-night!—­in case I don’t find you again in this crowd!”

She moved away then, leaving Innocent fairly bewildered by her entire coolness and self-possession.  She herself, poor child, moved to the very soul by the interview she had just gone through, was trembling with extreme nervousness, and could hardly conceal her agitation.

“I’m afraid you’ve caught cold!” said Lord Blythe, kindly—­“That will never do!  I promised I would take you to the Duchess as soon as I found you—­she has some friends with her who wish to meet you.  Will you come?”

She smiled assent, looking up at him gratefully and thinking what a handsome old man he was, with his tall, well-formed figure and fine intellectual face on which the constant progress of good thoughts had marked many a pleasant line.  Her mother’s husband!—­ and she wondered how it happened that such a woman had been chosen for a wife by such a man!

“They’re going to dance in the ball-room directly,” he continued, as he guided her through the pressing throng of people.  “You will not be without partners!  Are you fond of dancing?”

Her face lighted up with the lovely youthful look that gave her such fascination and sweetness of expression.

“Yes, I like it very much, though before I came to London I only knew country dances such as they dance at harvest-homes; but of course here, you all dance so differently!—­it is only just going round and round!  But it’s quite pleasant and rather amusing.”

“You were brought up in the country then?” he said.

“Yes, entirely.  I came to London about two years ago.”

“But—­I hope you don’t think me too inquisitive!—­where did you study literature?”

She laughed a little.

“I don’t think I studied it at all,” she answered, “I just loved it!  There was a small library of very old books in the farmhouse where I lived, and I read and re-read these.  Then, when I was about sixteen, it suddenly came into my head that I would try to write a story myself—­and I did.  Little by little it grew into a book, and I brought it to London and finished it here.  You know the rest!”

“Like Byron, you awoke one morning to find yourself famous!” said Lord Blythe, smiling.  “You have no parents living?”

Her cheeks burned with a hot blush as she replied.

“No.”

“A pity!  They would have been very proud of you.  Here is the Duchess!”

And in another moment she was drawn into the vortex of a brilliant circle surrounding her hostess—­men and women of notable standing in politics, art and letters, to whom the Duchess presented her with the half kindly, half patronising air of one who feels that any genius in man or woman is a kind of disease, and that the person affected by it must be soothingly considered as a sort of “freak” or nondescript creature, like a white crow or a red starling.