m were amazingly patronising and self-possessed, and these did not
ask Cicely to dance again. She felt, when they returned her to her
mother, that she had not been a success with them. Others were boyish
and diffident, and with them she got on pretty well. With one, a modest
child of nineteen or so with a high-sounding title, she was almost
maternally friendly, and he seemed to cling to her as a refuge from a
new and bewildering world. They ate ices together--he told her that he
had been brought up at home in Ireland under a priest, and had never
eaten enough ices at a sitting until he had joined his regiment a
fortnight before. He could not dance well, indeed hardly at all,
although he confessed to having taken lessons, and his gratitude when
Cicely suggested that they should go and look at some of the rooms
instead, warmed her heart to him and put their temporary friendship on
the best possible footing.

They stayed together during three dances, went out on to the terrace,
explored wherever they were permitted to explore, paid two visits to the
buffet, and enjoyed themselves much in the same way as if they had been
school-children surreptitiously breaking loose from an assembly of
grown-ups. The boy became volubly friendly and bubbling over with
unexpected humour and high spirits. He tried to persuade Cicely to stay
away from the ball-room for a fourth dance. Nobody would miss them, he
explained. But she said she must go back, and when they joined the crowd
again her partner was haled off with a frightened look to the royal
circle, and she found her mother standing up before the seat on which
she had sat all the evening searching anxiously for her with her eyes,
and her father by her side.

An old man, looking small and shrunken in his heavy uniform, but
otherwise full of life and kindliness, with twinkling eyes and a short
white beard, was with them, and she breathed a sigh of relief, for if
she was not frightened of what her mother might say about her long
absence, she rather dreaded the comments her father might be pleased to
pass on it. But her kinsman, Lord Meadshire, Lord-Lieutenant of the
county, a great magnate in the eyes of the world, was to her just a very
kind and playful old man, whose jokes only, because of their inherent
feebleness, caused her any discomfort. Cousin Humphrey would preserve
her from the results of her fault if she had committed one.

"Well, my dear," he said in an affectionate, rather