All the eyes swept from her to him and back; then everyone began to talk hastily about nothing. The young man's humiliation was public.
He went to the door under cover of the movement of the various couples to find places in the quadrille, yet every sidelong glance in the room still rested upon him, and he knew it. He remained in the ball, alone, through that dance, and at its conclusion, walked slowly through the rooms, speaking to people, here and there, as though nothing had happened, but when the music sounded again, he went to the dressing-room, found his hat and cloak, and left the house. For a while he stood on the opposite side of the street, watching the lighted windows, and twice he caught sight of the lilac and white brocade, the dark hair, and the wreath of marguerites.
Then, with a hot pain in his breast, and the step of a Grenadier, he marched down the street.
In the carriage Mrs. Tanberry took Betty's hand in hers. "I'll do as you wish, child," she said, "and never speak to you of him again as long as I live, except this once. I think it was best for his own sake as well as yours, but--"
"He needed a lesson," interrupted Miss Betty, wearily. She had danced long and hard, and she was very tired.
Mrs. Tanberry's staccato laugh came out irrepressibly. "All the vagabonds do, Princess!" she cried. "And I think they are getting it."
"No, no, I don't mean--"
"We've turned their heads, my dear, between us, you and I; and we'll have to turn `em again, or they'll break their necks looking over their shoul- ders at us, the owls!" She pressed the girl's hand affectionately. "But you'll let me say something just once, and forgive me because we're the same foolish age, you know. It's only this: The next young man you suppress, take him off in a corner! Lead him away from the crowd where he won't have to stand and let them look at him afterward. That's all, my dear, and you mustn't mind."
"I'm not sorry!" said Miss Betty hotly. "I'm not sorry!"
"No, no," said Mrs. Tanberry, soothingly. "It was better this time to do just what you did. I'd have done it myself, to make quite sure he would keep away--because I like him."
"I'm not sorry!" said Miss Betty again.
"I'm not sorry!" she repeated and reiterated to herself after Mrs.
Tanberry had gone to bed. She had sunk into a chair in the library with a book, and "I'm not sorry!" she whispered as the open unread page blurred before her, "I'm not sorry!" He had needed his lesson; but she had to bear the recollection of how white his face went when he received it. Her affront had put about him a strange loneliness: the one figure with the stilled crowd staring; it had made a picture from which her mind's eye had been unable to escape, danced she never so hard and late. Unconsciously, Robert Carewe's daughter had avenged the other figure which had stood in lonely humiliation before the staring eyes.
"I'm not sorry!" Ah, did they think it was in her to hurt any living thing in the world? The book dropped from her lap, and she bowed her head upon her hands. "I'm not sorry! "--and tears upon the small lace gauntlets!
She saw them, and with an incoherent exclamation, half self-pitying, half impatient, ran out to the stars above her garden.
She was there for perhaps half an hour, and just before she returned to the house she did a singular thing.
Standing where all was clear to the sky, where she had stood after her talk with the Incroyable, when he had bid her look to the stars, she raised her arms to them again, her face, pale with a great tenderness, uplifted.
"You, you, you! "she whispered. "I love you!"
And yet it was to nothing definite, to no man, nor outline of a man, to no phantom nor dream-lover, that she spoke; neither to him she had affronted, nor to him who had bidden her look to the stars. Nor was it to the stars themselves.
She returned slowly and thoughtfully to the house, wondering what she had meant.
