."

Aldous and Marcella followed. They had to pass along the great corridor
which ran round the quadrangle of the house. The antique marbles which
lined it were to-night masked in flowers, and seats covered in red had
been fitted in wherever it was possible, and were now crowded with
dancers "sitting out." From the ball-room ahead came waves of
waltz-music; the ancient house was alive with colour and perfume, with
the sounds of laughter and talk, lightly fretting, and breaking the
swaying rhythms of the band. Beyond the windows of the corridor, which
had been left uncurtained because of the beauty of the night, the stiff
Tudor garden with its fountains, which filled up the quadrangle, was
gaily illuminated under a bright moon; and amid all the varied colour of
lamps, drapery, dresses, faces, the antique heads ranged along the walls
of the corridor--here Marcus Aurelius, there Trajan, there Seneca--and
the marble sarcophagi which broke the line at intervals, stood in cold,
whitish relief.

Marcella passed along on Aldous's arm, conscious that people were
streaming into the corridor from all the rooms opening upon it, and that
every eye was fixed upon her and her mother. "Look, there she is," she
heard in an excited girl's voice as they passed Lord Maxwell's library,
now abandoned to the crowd like all the rest. "Come, quick! There--I
told you she was lovely!"

Every now and then some old friend, man or woman, rose smiling from the
seats along the side, and Aldous introduced his bride.

"On her dignity!" said an old hunting squire to his daughter when they
had passed. "Shy, no doubt--very natural! But nowadays girls, when
they're shy, don't giggle and blush as they used to in _my_ young days;
they look as if you meant to insult them, and they weren't going to
allow it! Oh, very handsome--very handsome--of course. But you can see
she's advanced--peculiar--or what d'ye call it?--woman's rights, I
suppose, and all that kind of thing? Like to see you go in for it,
Nettie, eh!"

"She's _awfully_ handsome," sighed his pink-cheeked, insignificant
little daughter, still craning her neck to look--"very simply dressed
too, except for those lovely pearls. She does her hair very oddly, so
low down--in those plaits. Nobody does it like that nowadays."

"That's because nobody has such a head," said her brother, a young
Hussar lieutenant, beside her, in the tone of connoisseurship. "By
George, she's ripping--she's the best-lookin