Seeing her so radiant now, with sparkling eyes and ready
laugh, it was difficult to conceive her haunted by any such anxieties
as Miss Armytage had mentioned. Yet the moment she perceived him,
as if his presence acted as a reminder to lift her out of the
delicious present, something of her gaiety underwent eclipse.
Child of impulse that she was, she gave no thought to her action and
the construction it might possibly bear in the minds of men chagrined
and slighted.
"Why, Ned," she cried, "you have kept me waiting." And with a
complete and charming ignoring of the claims of all who had been
before him, and who were warring there for precedence of one another,
she took his arm in token that she yielded herself to him before
even the honour was so much as solicited.
With nods and smiles to right and left - a queen dismissing her
court - she passed on the captain's arm through the little crowd
that gave way before her dismayed and intrigued, and so away.
O'Moy, who had been awaiting a favourable moment to present the
marshal by the marshal's own request, attempted to thrust forward
now with Beresford at his side. But the bowing line of officers
whose backs were towards him effectively barred his progress, and
before they had broken up that formation her ladyship and her
cavalier were out of sight, lost in the moving crowd.
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