these
doors surged the inferior crowd of persons who had been specially
invited to 'meet their Royal Highnesses,' and had so far been held
worthy neither to dance nor to eat in the same room with them. But
in vain. Rose still felt herself, for all her laughing outward
_insouciance_, a poor bruised, helpless chattel, trodden under the heel
of a world which was intolerably powerful, rich, and self-satisfied, the
odious product of 'family arrangements.'

Mr. Flaxman sat far away at the same royal table as herself. Beside
him was the thin tall _debutante_. 'She is like one of the Gainsborough
princesses,' thought Rose, studying her with, involuntary admiration.
'Of course it is all plain. He will get everything he wants, and a Lady
Florence into the bargain. Radical, indeed! What nonsense!'

Then it startled her to find that eyes of Lady Florence's neighbors
were, as it seemed, on herself; or was he merely nodding to Lady
Helen?--and she began immediately to give a smiling attention to the man
on her left.

An hour later she and Agnes and Lady Helen were descending the great
staircase on their way to their carriage. The morning light was
flooding through the chinks of the carefully veiled windows; Lady Helen
was yawning behind her tiny white hand, her eyes nearly asleep. But the
two sisters, who had not been up till three, on four preceding nights,
like their chaperon, were still as fresh as the flowers massed in the
hall below.

'Ah, there is Hugh!' cried Lady Helen. 'How I hope he has found the
carriage!'

At that moment Rose slipped on a spray of gardenia, which had dropped
from the bouquet of some predecessor. To prevent herself from falling
down stairs, she caught hold of the stem of a brazen chandelier fixed
in the balustrade. It saved her, but she gave her arm a most painful
wrench, and leant limp and white against the railing of the stairs. Lady
Helen turned at Agnes's exclamation, but before she could speak, as it
seemed, Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing talking just below them, was
on the stairs.

'You have hurt your arm? Don't speak--take mine. Let me get you down
stairs out of the crush.'

She was too far gone to resist, and when she was mistress of herself
again she found herself in the library with some water in her hand which
Mr. Flaxman had just put there.

'Is it the playing hand?' said Lady Helen anxiously.

'No,' said Rose, trying to laugh; 'the bowing elbow.' And she raised it
but with a