“Romayne, at last! By Jove, old man, we thought you were going to throw us over!”

The voice, a young man’s voice, struck out, as it were, from an indescribable medley of incongruous sound. The background was formed by the lightest and most melodious dance music, produced solely from stringed instruments; lutes and guitars seemed to predominate, and the result had a character and rhythm of its own which was essentially graceful, picturesque, and Italian; against the background, a high-pitched discord compounded of every imaginable key, there clashed a very Babel of tongues—the eminently unmusical voice of modern society, with all its faults of modulation and pronunciation, blended into a whole full of a character absolutely incompatible with the old-time southern harmonies with which it mingled.

The speaker’s figure, as he stopped suddenly in a hurried passage across the room, stood out from a blaze of colour, light, and gorgeousness of every description, which fell without pause or cessation into ever fresh combination, as the beautifully dressed crowd moved to and fro in its magnificent setting. And the spectacle presented to the eye was as curiously jarring, as strikingly suggestive of the ludicrous inconsistencies of dreamland, as were the sounds that saluted the ear. There was hardly a man or woman to be seen whose dress was not as faithful a copy of the costume prevalent among the Florentine nobles under the magnificent rule of the Medici as time and money could make it. There was not a false note in the surroundings; money had been poured out like water in order that a perfect reproduction of an old Florentine palace might be achieved; and as far as art could go nothing was left to be desired. The fault lay with nature. The old Italians doubtless had their own mannerisms, possibly their own vulgarities, of carriage, gesture, and general demeanour; but theirs were not the mannerisms and vulgarities of modern “smart” society.

The young man who had greeted Julian exemplified in his own person all the preposterous incongruity of the whole. His dress was a marvel of correctness to the minutest detail. Its wearer’s face was of the heavy, inanimate, bull-dog type; his movement as he shook hands with Julian was an exaggerated specimen of the approved affectation of the moment; his speech was clipped and drawled after the most approved model among “mashers.” He was the son of the house, and there was a kind of slow excitement about his manner, struggling with a nonchalant carelessness which he evidently wished to present to the world as his mental attitude of the moment. There was a note of excitement also in the medley of voices about him. The “affair” was “a huge go”—as the young man himself would have expressed it. And neither he nor any one of his father’s guests was troubled for one instant by any sense of the ludicrousness of the effect produced.

Julian had that instant entered the room and had paused on the threshold. There is perhaps no type of costume more picturesque in its magnificence than that of the Italian noble of the Middle Ages—this is perhaps the reason why it has been so extensively vulgarised—and Julian’s dress was an admirable specimen of its kind, rich, graceful, and becoming. There was a subtle difference between his bearing and that of his host, though Julian’s demeanour, too, was modern to the finest shade. He wore the dress well, with none of the other man’s awkwardness, but on the contrary with an absolute ease and unconsciousness which implied a certain excited tension of nerve. His face was colourless and very hard; but upon the hardness there was a mask of animation and gaiety which was all-sufficient for the present occasion.

“I’m awfully sorry, dear boy!” he said now, lightly and eagerly, and with an exaggerated gesture of deprecation. “It’s horribly late, I know! Give you my word I couldn’t help it! By Jove, what a magnificent thing you’ve made of this!”

The other glanced round with a satisfaction which he tried in vain to repress.

“Not so bad, is it?” he said carelessly. “Only these fellows are such fools, even the best of them; they always blunder if they can.” With this wholesale condemnation of the workmen among whom, some fifty years ago, his grandfather might have been found, he screwed his eyeglass into his eye, serenely unconscious of the comic effect produced, for the better contemplation of a pretty girl at the farther end of the room. “Lady Pamela looks awfully fit, doesn’t she?” he observed parenthetically; continuing almost in the same breath: “The gardens are the best part, seems to me. Awfully like the real thing, don’t you know!”

Julian’s only direct answer was an expressive gesture of appreciation and apology.

“Awfully well done!” he said. “Excuse me, dear boy, I see my mother, and she’ll want to know why I’ve not turned up before. I must go and explain.”

His companion laughed; the laugh was rather derisive, and the glance he cast on Julian through his eyeglass was stupidly inquisitive and incredulous.

“What a fellow you are, Romayne!” he said. “They ought to put you in a glass case and label you the model son.”

Another gay, expressive gesture from Julian.

“Why not?” he said lightly. “We’re a model pair, you know.”

And the next moment he was threading his way quickly across the room. A sudden movement of the crowd had shown him his mother’s figure, and he had realised instinctively that she had seen him. He came up to her with a manner about which there was something indescribably reckless, and made her a low bow of gay and abject apology.

“I beg ten thousand million pardons!” he said. “Language fails to express my feelings.”

Mrs. Romayne’s dress was not a success—that is to say, it was perfect in itself, and failed only as a setting for its wearer; to deprive her appearance of any possibility of “chic” or “dash” was to deprive it of all its brilliancy. But no unsuitability of colouring or cut in her gown could have been responsible for the look which underlay her smile, as she turned to Julian now and struck a little attitude of mock implacability, with a light, high-pitched laugh.

“Then the conversation must be carried on in dumb show,” she said, “for language also fails to express my feelings, sir. What have you to say for yourself?”

Her voice, for all its gaiety, was thin and strained.

“Please, nothing,” was the mock-humility answer. “I met a fellow, and he beguiled me. He was just off to America.”

He was standing with his hands folded and his eyes cast down, and he did not see—he would not have understood if he had seen—the strange flash in those hard, blue eyes—such a flash as might leap up in the eyes of a woman in the silent endurance of a swift stab of pain.

“A very poor excuse,” declared Mrs. Romayne gaily. “No, I don’t think I shall forgive you yet. Such unscrupulous desertion must be visited as it deserves. Don’t you think so?”

Lord Garstin had come up to them, and the question was addressed to him with a light laugh as she gave him her hand. He nodded pleasantly to Julian as he answered:

“Who has deserted? Not this boy of yours, eh?”

Mrs. Romayne laughed again, and pushed Julian playfully with her fan.

“Oh, I forgot! You don’t know his wickedness, of course! Take me away from him, Lord Garstin, do, and I’ll confide in you. Gorgeous affair this, isn’t it? I wonder what it cost?”

Lord Garstin looked round with a rather lofty smile. There were times when it pleased him to pose as an isolated representative of a bygone age by the traditions of which, in matters of taste and breeding, the present age was utterly condemned.

“Rather too gorgeous to please an old man,” he said now with a fine reserve. “These dear good people would be more to my taste, do you know, if they had a little less money. Have you been outside, by-the-bye? It’s really not badly done.”

Mrs. Romayne turned away with him, laughing and nodding to Julian, and then she stopped and went towards her son again, touching his shoulder lightly.

“Every one isn’t so stony-hearted as I am, bad boy,” she whispered gaily. “Somebody has actually kept you some dances, I believe, if you apologise properly. Look, there she is.”

She made a little gesture with her fan towards the entrance to the dancing-room, from which Maud Pomeroy was just emerging, looking like a picture in a white dress of the simplest form, her long hair loose on her shoulders, and crowned with a wreath of flowers. The dance music had stopped, and the music which still filled the air came from the garden. With that hard recklessness growing stronger on his face, Julian made a slight, graceful gesture towards his mother as though he would have kissed his hand to her in gratitude, turned away, and moved rapidly over to Miss Pomeroy.

More than three hours had gone by since Julian had found himself standing alone gazing stupidly in the direction in which Clemence had disappeared, and how the first two of those hours had passed he hardly knew. He had turned abruptly away and left the little street, to walk mechanically on and on, struggling blindly in a black abyss of self-contempt, in which his love lived only as additional torture.

He had emerged gradually from that abyss, or rather his sense of its surrounding blackness had faded by degrees, as all such acute sensations must. And so completely had that blackness walled him in, and deadened all his outward perceptions, that it was only little by little, and with a dull sense of surprise, that his material surroundings dawned on him again, and he realised that he was standing looking down into the river from the Thames Embankment. His consciousness had come back to that life and world which he believed to constitute the only practical realities; but it had brought with it that which turned all its environment to bitterness and gall. As he stood leaning on the parapet, staring sullenly down, counting the reflection of the lamps in the dark water beneath him in the moody vacancy of reaction, the necessities of his life began to surround him once more; he saw them all as they were, sordid and base, and yet he neither saw nor attempted to see any possibility of self-extrication. The sound of Big Ben as it struck eleven had brought back to his mind the claims upon him of that particular evening.

At eleven o’clock the carriage had been ordered to take Mrs. Romayne and her party to the dance, and a grim, cynical smile touched his set, white lips as he thought of his mother. He had broken loose, temporarily, he told himself bitterly. He must take up his part again and play the farce out.

That he should throw himself into the task with a wild oblivion of all proportion and limitation, was the inevitable result of all that had gone before; of all the perception and all the blindness with which he was racked and baffled.

Miss Pomeroy saw him coming, and turning her face away, she produced a pretty, well-turned comment on the arrangement of the rooms for the benefit of her cavalier. The next instant Julian stood beside her.

“Don’t turn your back on me,” he implored gaily. “No fellow ever had such hard luck as I’ve had to-night. Be a great deal kinder to me than I seem to deserve, and forgive me. Please!”

Miss Pomeroy turned her head and looked at him with a serene calm on her pretty face, which seemed to relegate him to a place among inferior objects entirely indifferent to her. Her voice was perhaps a little too indifferent.

“Oh, Mr. Romayne!” she said. “You’ve actually appeared!”

“I have,” he said. “At last! There’s a poor fellow I’ve seen a good deal of—not one of the regular set, you know, but a thoroughly unlucky chap, always in the wars. He’s just off to try his luck on the other side of the world, and I met him this evening most awfully blue and lonely—he hasn’t a friend in the world. Of course I had to try and cheer him up a bit, and—there, I couldn’t leave him, don’t you know. I packed him into the mail train at last, and bolted here as fast as wheels could bring me.”

Something of the blank serenity of Miss Pomeroy’s face gave way. She lifted the feather fan that hung at her girdle and began to ruffle the feathers lightly against her other hand with lowered eyelids.

“I don’t think I should have troubled to hurry as it was so late!” she said, and there was a touch of reproach and resentment in her voice. Her cavalier had drifted away by this time, and in the midst of the constantly moving stream of people she and Julian were practically alone. Julian answered her quickly with eager significance.

“You would—in my place!” he said. “You would if you had had the hope of even one of the dances to which you had been looking forward—well, I won’t say how, or for how long. Was it altogether a vain hope? Am I quite too late?”

“You are very late!” was the answer; but the tone was distant and indifferent no longer; and as the sound of the violins rose softly and invitingly once more from the other room a quick question from Julian received a soft affirmative in reply, and he led her triumphantly towards the music.

The room was not too full. The garden, the supper, the “show”—as the guests called it amongst themselves—as a whole, prevented any overcrowding in the dancing-room. But dancing among such cunningly arranged accessories was by no means a commonplace business. The unfamiliar picturesqueness of the room, with its softly scented air, the wonderful effects of colour and light, and above all a certain wild passion and sweetness about the music, was not wholly without effect even on the jaded, torpid receptivity of men and women of the world.

Even Miss Pomeroy’s calm was apparently not wholly proof against the intoxication; by the time the music died away there was a bright colour on her cheeks, and a bright light in her eyes. On Julian the atmosphere and the music had had much the same effect as an excessive quantity of champagne might have had. His pale face had flushed hotly, and his eyes were glittering with excitement.

He had become aware during their last turn round the room that his mother was standing in the doorway watching them, this time with Loring in attendance; and with a feverish flash of callous defiance he so guided their movements that they came to a standstill finally close before her.

“Congratulate us!” he cried gaily, “we’ve broken the record! And congratulate me individually, for I’ve had the most awfully glorious dance of my life! Hullo, Loring, old man!”

“I’ll congratulate you both,” was Mrs. Romayne’s ready answer, as Loring nodded. “You both look as if you had had a good time. Wonderful show, isn’t it? It isn’t possible to say what it must have cost. Something appalling, of course. Maud, dear, have you come across Claudia Eden? Over there, don’t you see? Isn’t it outrageous?”

“By Jove!” ejaculated Julian lightly, looking in the direction indicated by a slight movement of his mother’s fan, as Miss Pomeroy uttered an exclamation of pretty amazement. Conspicuous against all the magnificence about her was a girl in a kind of burlesque of an Italian contadina dress of the period, with very short skirts, very low-cut bodice, very exaggerated head-dress. She was talking and laughing with a little crowd of men; her manner was as pronounced and as unrefined as her dress; but there was about her that absolutely unconscious and impenetrable self-possession and self-assurance which stamped her as being by birth that which she was certainly not in appearance—a lady, and a very highly born lady.

“She would do anything to make a sensation,” murmured Miss Pomeroy, contemplating her critically.

“But have you two seen the gardens?” went on Mrs. Romayne gaily. “No? Then you must simply go instantly. The most marvellous thing I ever saw! Go along at once.”

With a laugh Julian turned to Miss Pomeroy. “We must do as we are bidden, of course,” he said. “Will it bore you frightfully?”

A smile and the slightest possible shrug of the shoulders constituted Miss Pomeroy’s answer, and they were turning away together, followed by a keen glance from Loring, when the girl in the contadina dress, passing close to them with her somewhat noisy court, intercepted their passing.

“‘Evening, Maud,” she said in a loud, good-natured voice, which might have been delicate and high-bred if fashion had not demanded other characteristics. “Hullo, Mr. Romayne! Like my frock, Maud?”

Miss Pomeroy murmured something gracefully inaudible, and Mrs. Romayne said, with a smile:

“Most original, Lady Claudia.”

A restless gleam had come into Mrs. Romayne’s eyes at the momentary pause, but there was a certain satisfaction, too, in her smile as the two girls stood face to face. Maud Pomeroy certainly never appeared to greater advantage than in contrast with a pronounced type of the modern society girl. The juxtaposition seemed to bring into strong relief everything about her appearance and demeanour which was dainty, gentle, and sweet, and to throw into shade all her more negative charm. Her voice, now, perfectly modulated and absolutely even, made the other girl seem “quite too vulgar,” as Mrs. Romayne said to herself. She echoed Mrs. Romayne’s words, and added:

“How came you to think of it?”

“I thought it would score,” returned the other, with a laugh. “I can’t stand these people, don’t you know! I thought of getting a whole lot of us to do it; it would have been no end of a joke! Then I thought that I’d keep it to myself. Ta-ta!”

And with a rough, ungraceful gesture of farewell she passed on.

“Lady Claudia’s hostess would strangle her, cheerfully, with her own hands,” remarked Loring placidly.

Mrs. Romayne laughed.

“So would a great many other people,” she said. “But come, you two be off and see these gardens.”

Julian and Miss Pomeroy moved away as if with one consent, and Mrs. Romayne watched them as they went with such a strange intentness in her face, that she looked for the moment as though her consciousness were actually leaving her to follow the two on whom her eyes were fixed.

The idea of the whole entertainment had originated, so people said, in the fact that its giver had spent enormous sums of money in the course of the past three years on the transformation of his grounds into an Italian garden, and the scene from the terrace, as Julian and Miss Pomeroy stepped out on to it, was indeed extraordinarily effective. There was no moon, and thousands of coloured lamps, skilfully disposed, shed a picturesque, uncertain light, under which the long ilex-shaded alleys, the box hedges, the fountains, and the statues produced an illusion which was almost perfect.

“By Jove!” exclaimed Julian in the same strained, excited voice. “Capital, isn’t it? It must be almost worth while to live away here in the wilds of Fulham to have a place capable of being turned into a show like this. Don’t you think so?”

Miss Pomeroy did not answer immediately. Apparently, the excitement created by their dance had rather strengthened than diminished during the interval, and she was playing almost nervously with her fan. Miss Pomeroy was not a nervous person as a rule.

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “Yes, it’s very pretty, isn’t it? But I don’t think I should much care to have a big place, do you know. I don’t think places make much difference.”

Her voice was low, and very prettily modulated, and Julian threw a quick sideways glance at her. Except for a flush, and a certain look in her eyes which he could not see, her face was as demure and placid as ever.

“Don’t you?” he said. “You are right, of course, and I am wrong. I can imagine circumstances under which all this would be a howling wilderness to me.”

He looked at her very differently this time, with his eyes recklessly eloquent. She dropped her own eyes quickly, and said softly:

“Can you?”

They had strolled down the steps as they talked, and at their right hand a picturesque little alley, with a vista of fountain and statue against a grove of ilex-trees, led away from the more open space in front of the house. Down this alley, secluded and apparently deserted, Miss Pomeroy turned, as if unconsciously, before she spoke again. Julian followed her lead with an ugly smile on his face.

Then she said in the same pretty, low voice:

“Tell me what circumstances?”

Julian laughed, and his laugh might well have been construed as a sign of extreme nervousness and agitation.

“I think not!” he said. “I might make you angry.”

“You would not make me angry!”

They came to the end of the alley as she spoke; it opened out on a quaint little corner containing a fish-pond surrounded by a stone balustrade, the fountain in the middle sparkling and dancing in the gleam of the artificial moonlight which had been arranged here and there about the grounds to give the finishing touch to sundry “bits.” Into this moonlight Maud Pomeroy stepped, and stood leaning gracefully over the balustrade gazing down into the water, as she said in a voice just low and hesitating enough to be perfectly distinct:

“Mr. Romayne, will you tell me—did you think me very angry when you came to-night?”

“I hope you are not angry now, at least!” was the answer, spoken with eager anxiety. “But I would rather think you had been angry than believe that you were quite indifferent as to whether I came or not!”

“I am not—indifferent!” Maud Pomeroy paused. There was no colour at all in her cheeks now, and her lips were drawn together in a hard, thin line such as no one had ever seen on her face before. There was a dead silence. A sudden stillness had come over Julian’s figure as he stood also leaning against the balustrade, but with his back to the water. His hand was clenched fiercely against the stone.

“I have no right to be angry with you,” Maud Pomeroy went on; her voice was thin and hard as if its steadiness was the result of deliberate effort. “I have no rights at all. If I had——” She let her voice die away again with deliberate intention.

The silence that followed had something ghastly in it. At last, with his face as white as death, and keeping his eyes fixed steadily before him, Julian moved.

“You will catch cold, I’m afraid!” he said, a little hoarsely. “Shall we go in?”

Without a single word Miss Pomeroy moved also and retraced her steps up the alley. For one moment, and for one moment only, her face was no longer that of a gentle and amiable girl, but of a spiteful and vindictive woman.