There was a ball at Penton that evening.

Nothing was more unusual than a ball at Penton. The family festivities were usually of the gravest kind. Solemn dinner-parties, duties of society, collections of people who had to be asked, county potentates, with whom Alicia and her husband had dined, and who had to be repaid. Nothing under fifty, unless it might be by chance now and then a newly married couple added in the natural progress of events to the circle of the best people, ever appeared at that luxurious but somewhat heavy table. Mr. Russell Penton chafed, but endured, and talked politics with the squires, and did his best to relieve the ponderous propriety of their wives. He was good at making the best of things; and when he could do nothing more he put on a brave face and supported it. But now, for once in a way, youth was paramount. The young people from Penton Hook, who had little acquaintance with the other young people of all the county families who were invited, had not so much as heard of what was in store for them; and Ally reflected, when she did hear, that it was something like an inspiration which had induced her mother to provide her with that second evening dress, which was quite suitable for a first ball. It was very simple, very white, fit for her age, her slim figure, and youthful aspect. But it was not for Ally that the ball was given. “I believe it is my ball,” Mab had told her. “It is my first visit to Penton since I was a child, and now that I am out Aunt Alicia thinks that something has to be done for me. Are you ‘out’? but you must be, of course, or you would not have been asked for to-day.”

“I don’t know whether I am out or not,” said Ally, with a blush; “but I don’t think mother, if she knew, would have any objection. I am eighteen. I have never been at a ball before. Perhaps I may not dance in the right way.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Mab, “whatever way you dance you have only to stick to it and say that is the right way.”

The two girls were alone, for Walter had just been mysteriously called out of the room. And though Ally’s thoughts followed her brother with anxiety, wondering what could be wanted with him, yet the novelty of the scene and the companionship of a girl of her own age so warmed her heart, that she forgot the precautions and cares which had been so impressed upon her, and began to talk and to act by natural impulse without thought.

“I should never have the courage to do that,” she said; “I have never even seen people dancing. We had a few lessons when we were children, and sometimes we try with Wat, just to see, if we ever had a chance, how we could get on. Anne plays and I have a turn, or else Anne has a turn and I play.”

“Is Anne your only sister?”

“Oh, no,” cried Ally, with a laugh at the impossibility of such a suggestion; “there are two in the nursery. We are two boys and two girls, grown up; and the little ones are just the same, two and two.”

“How unfair things are in this world,” said Mab; “to think there should be so many of you and only one of me!”

“It is strange,” said Ally; “but not perhaps unfair: for when there is only one your father and mother must seem so much nearer to you—you must feel that they belong altogether to you.”

“Perhaps. Mamma died when I was born, so I never knew her at all. Papa is dead too. Don’t let us talk of that. I never think of things that are disagreeable,” said Mab, “what is the use? It can’t do you any good, it only makes you worse thinking. Tell me about to-night. Who will be here? are they nice? are they good dancers? Tell me which is the best dancer about, that I may ask Uncle Gerald to introduce him to me.”

“I know nobody,” said Ally.

“Nobody! though you have lived here all your life! Oh, you little envious thing! You want to keep them all to yourself; you won’t tell me! Very well. I have no doubt your brother dances well; he has the figure for it. I shall dance with him all the night.”

“Oh, no; that would be too much. But I hope you will dance with him to give him a little confidence. Indeed, what I say is quite true. We don’t know anybody; we have been brought up so—quietly. We never were here before.”

“Oh!” Mab said. She was an inquiring young woman, and she had not believed what she had heard. She had made very light of Mrs. Russell Penton’s description of her relations as “not in our sphere.” As Ally spoke, however, Mab’s eyes opened wider; she began to realize the real position. The misfortunes of the young Pentons had gone further than she had believed; they were poor relations in the conventional sense of the word, people to be thrust into a corner, to be allowed to shift for themselves. But not if they have some one to look after them, Mab said to herself. She took up their cause with heat and fury. “You shall soon know everybody,” she cried; “Uncle Gerald will see to that, and so shall I.” It then occurred to her that Ally might resent this as an offer of patronage, and she added, hastily, “Promise to introduce all your good partners to me, and I will introduce all mine to you. Is that settled? Oh, then between us we shall soon find out which are the best.”

How kind she was! To be sure, Cousin Alicia was not very kind; there was nothing effusive about her. No doubt she must mean to be agreeable, or why should she have asked them? though her manner was not very cordial. But as for Mab—who insisted that she was to be called Mab, and not Miss Russell—she was more “nice” than anything that Ally could have imagined possible. She was like a new sister, she was like one of ourselves. So Ally declared with warmth to Wat, who knocked at the door of her room just as she was beginning to dress for dinner, with a face full of importance and gravity. He was quite indifferent as to Mab, but he told her of Sir Walter with a sort of enthusiasm. “He said I must not forget that I was his heir, and that he would like to make a man of me. What do you think he could mean, Ally, by saying that I was his heir, after all?”

Ally could not tell; how was it possible that she should tell, as she had not heard or seen the interview? And besides, she was not the clever one to be able to divine what people meant. She threw, however, a little light on the subject by suggesting that perhaps he meant the title. “For you must be heir to the title, Wat,” she said; “nobody can take that from you.” Wat’s countenance fell at this, for he did not like to think that it was merely the baronetcy Sir Walter meant when he called him his heir. However, there was not very much time to talk. Walter had to hurry to his room to get ready, and Ally to finish dressing her hair and to put on her dress, with a curious feeling of strangeness which took away her pleasure in it. Of course, you really could see yourself better in the long, large glass than in the little ones at the Hook, but an admiring audience of mother and sisters are more exhilarating to dress to than the noblest mirror. And Ally felt sad and excited—not excited as a girl generally does before her first ball, but filled with all manner of indefinite alarms. There was nothing to be alarmed about. Cousin Alicia, however cold she might seem, would not suffer, after all, her own relations to be neglected. And then there was Mab. The girl felt the confused prospect before her of pleasure—which she was not sure would be pleasure, or anything but a disguised pain—to grow brighter and more natural when she thought of Mab. And that compact about the partners. Ally wondered whether she would get any partners, or if they would all overlook her in her corner, a little girl whom nobody knew.

And then came dinner, an agitating but brilliant ceremonial, with a confusing brightness of lights and flowers and ferns, and everything so strange, and the whole disturbed by an underlying dread of doing something wrong. Sir Walter at the head of the table, a strange image of age and tremulous state, looked to Ally like an old sage in a picture, or an old magician, one in whose very look there were strange powers. She scarcely raised her eyes when she was presented to him, but courtesied to the ground as if he had been a king, and did not feel at all sure that the look he gave her might not work some miraculous change in her. But Sir Walter did not take much notice of Ally, his attention was all given to Wat, whom he desired to have near him, and at whom he looked with that pleasure near to tears which betrays the weakness of old age. When dinner was over the old man would not have Russell Penton’s arm, nor would he let his servant help him. He signed to Wat, to the astonishment of all, and shuffled into the ball-room, where half of the county were assembled, leaning on the arm of the youth, who was no less astonished than everybody else. Sir Walter was very tall, taller than Wat, and he was heavy, and leaned his full weight upon the slight boy of twenty, who required all his strength to keep steady and give the necessary support. Mrs. Russell Penton, who was already in the ball-room receiving her guests, grew pale like clay when she saw this group approach. “Father, let me take you to your seat,” she said, hurriedly, neglecting a family newly arrived too, who were waiting for her greeting. “Nothing of the kind, Alicia. I’m well off to-night. I’ve got Wat, you see,” the old gentleman said, and walked up the whole length of the room, smiling and bowing, and pausing to speak to the most honored guests. “This is young Walter,” he said, introducing the boy, “don’t you know? My successor, you know,” with that old tremulous laugh which was half a cough, and brought the tears to his eyes. The people who knew the circumstances—and who did not know the circumstances?—stared and asked each other what could have happened to bring about such a revolution. When Sir Walter had been seated at the upper end of his room he dismissed his young attendant with a caressing tap upon his arm. “Now go, boy, and find your partner. You must open the ball, you know; nothing can be done till you’ve opened the ball. Go, go, and don’t keep everybody waiting.” Poor Wat could not tell what to do when raised to this giddy height without any preparation, not knowing anybody, very doubtful about his own powers as a dancer, or what was the etiquette of such performances. Russell Penton almost thrust Mab upon him in his pause of bewilderment. And from where she stood at the door, stately and rigid, Alicia looked with a blank gaze upon this boy, this poor relation, whom her eyes had avoided, whom she had included almost perforce in her reluctant invitation to his sister, but who was thus made the principal figure in her entertainment. She had been reluctant to ask Ally, but the brother had been put in quite against her will. His name, his look, the resemblance which she refused to see, but yet could not ignore, were all intolerable to her; but her father’s sudden fancy for the boy, his change of sentiment so inconceivable, so unexplainable, struck chill to her heart.

When she was released from her duties of receiving she found out the doctor among the crowd of more important guests, and begged him to give her his opinions.

“How do you think my father looks?”

“Extremely well—better than he has looked for years—as if he had taken a new lease,” the doctor said.

Mrs. Russell Penton shook her head. She herself was very pale; her eyes shone with a strange, unusual luster. She said to herself that it was superstition. Why should not an old man take a passing fancy? It would pass with the occasion, it might mean nothing. There was no reason to suppose that this wonderful contradiction, this apparent revolution in his mind, was anything but a sudden impression, an effect—though so different from that in herself—of the stirring up of old associations. She sat down beside her father, and did her best to subdue the state of unusual exhilaration in which he was.

“You must not stay longer than you feel disposed,” she said, with her hand upon his arm.

“Oh, don’t fear for me, Alicia. I am wonderfully well; I never felt better. Look at young Wat, with that little partner of his! Isn’t she the little heiress? I shouldn’t wonder if he carried off the prize, the rascal! eh, Gerald? and very convenient too in the low state of the exchequer,” the old gentleman said; and he chuckled and laughed with the water in his eyes, while his daughter by his side felt herself turning to stone. It was not, she said to herself passionately, for fear of his changing his mind. It was that a change so extraordinary looked to her anxious eyes like one of those mental excitements which are said to go before the end.

It was Ally’s own fault that she got behind backs, and escaped the attentions which Mr. Russell Penton, absorbed, he, too, in this curious little drama, had intended to pay her. Ally, in the shade of larger interests, fell out of that importance which ought to belong to a dÉbutante. It was a great consolation to her when young Rochford suddenly appeared, excited and delighted, anxious to know if she had still a dance to give him. Poor Ally had as many dances as she pleased to give, and knew nobody in all this bewildering brilliant assembly so well as himself. She was unspeakably relieved and comforted when he introduced her to his sisters and his mother, who, half out of natural kindness, and half because of the distinction of having a Miss Penton—who was a real Penton, though a poor one, in the great house which bore her name—under her wing, encouraged Ally to take refuge by her side, and talked to her and soothed her out of the frightened state of loneliness and abandonment which is perhaps more miserable to a young creature expecting pleasure in a ball-room than anywhere else. They got her partners among their own set, the guests who were, so to speak, below the salt, the secondary strata in the great assembly—who indeed were quite good enough for Ally—quite as good as any one, though without handles to their names or any prestige in society. Mab, when she met her new friend, stopped indeed to whisper aside, “Where have you picked up that man?” but Mab, too, was fully occupied with her own affairs. And Walter was altogether swept away from his sister. He made more acquaintances in the next hour or two than he had done for all the previous years of his life. If his head was a little turned, if he felt that some wonderful unthought-of merit must suddenly have come out in him, who could wonder? He met Ally now and then, or saw her dancing and happy; and, with a half-guilty gladness, feeling that there was no necessity for him to take her upon his shoulders, abandoned himself to the intoxication of his own success. It was his first; it was totally unexpected, and it was very sweet.

The time came, however, as the time always comes, when all this fascination and delight came to an end. Sir Walter had retired hours before; and now the last lingering guest had departed, the last carriage had rolled away, the lights were extinguished, the great house had fallen into silence and slumber after the fatigue of excitement and enjoyment. Walter did not know how late, or rather how early it was, deep in the heart of the wintery darkness toward morning, when he was roused from his first sleep by sudden sounds in the corridor, and voices outside his door. A sound of other doors opening and shutting, of confused cries and footsteps, made it evident to him that something unusual had occurred, as he sprung up startled and uneasy. The first thought that springs to the mind of every inexperienced adventurer in this world, that the something which has happened must specially affect himself, made him think of some catastrophe at home, and made him clutch at his clothes and dress himself hurriedly, with a certainty that he was about to be summoned. There flashed through Walter’s mind with an extraordinary rapidity, as if flung across his consciousness from without, the possibility that it might be his father—the thought that in that case it would actually be he, as old Sir Walter had said, who would be—The thought was guilty, barbarous, unnatural. It did not originate in the young man’s own confused, half-awakened mind. What is there outside of us that flings such horrible realizations across our consciousness without any will of ours? He had not time to feel how horrible it was when he recognized Mrs. Russell Penton’s voice outside in hurried tones, sharp with some urgent necessity. “Some one must go for Edward Penton and Rochford—Rochford and the papers. Who can we send, who will understand? Oh, Gerald, not you, not you. Don’t let me be alone at this moment—let all go rather than that.”

“If it must be done, I am the only man to do it, Alicia—if his last hours are to be disturbed for this.”

“His last hours! they are disturbed already; he can not rest; he calls for Rochford, Rochford! It is no doing of mine—that you should think so of me at this moment! How am I to quiet my father? But, Gerald, don’t leave me—don’t you leave me?” she cried.

Walter threw his door open in the excitement of his sudden waking. The light flooded in his eyes, dazzling him. “I’ll go,” he said, unable to see anything except a white figure and a dark one standing together in the flicker of the light which was blown about by the air from some open window. Presently Alicia Penton’s face became visible to him, pale, with a lace handkerchief tied over her head, which changed her aspect strangely, and her eyes full of agitation and nervous unrest. She fell back when she saw him, crying, with a sharp tone of pain, “You!”

“I’m wide awake,” said the young man. “I thought something must have happened at home. If there’s a horse or a dog-cart I’ll go.”

“Sir Walter is very ill,” said Russell Penton. “I hope not dying, but very ill. And you know what they want, to settle the matter with your father and get that deed executed at once.”

“I’ll go,” said Wat, half sullen in the repetition, in the sudden perception that burst upon him once again from outside with all its train of ready-made thoughts—that if he lingered, if he delayed, it might be too late, and Penton would still be his—that there was no duty laid upon him to go at all, contrary to his interests, contrary to all his desires that—that—He gave a little stamp with his foot and repeated, doggedly, “I said I’d go. I’m ready. To bring Rochford and the papers, to bring my father; that’s what I’ve got to do.”

“That is what Mrs. Penton does not venture to ask of you.”

“Oh, boy,” cried Alicia, lifting up her hands, “go, go! It is not for me, it is for my father. I don’t know what he means to do, but he can not rest till it is done. He can’t die, do you know what I mean? It is on his mind, and he can’t get free—for the love of Heaven go!”

“This moment,” Walter said.