"Must you go, Lady Bell? Well, good-night. And thank you for making my poor little dance a success. Thank you very much."
Lady Bell said nothing, but she smiled "in her old colonial way," as they called it, and threaded through the lane of human beings on the stairs.
"Lady Earlsley's carriage!" shouted the footman in the gorgeous Merivale livery, and a little brougham drove up.
Her stables and coach-houses were crowded with horses and carriages, her wardrobes filled to repletion with Worth's costumes and Elise's "confections," as bonnets are called now-a-days, but a plain little brougham was her favorite vehicle, and the simplest of costumes pleased her best.
All the way down the stairs she had to nod and smile and exchange farewells, and at the bottom, in the hall, on the stone steps themselves, she was surrounded by men eager to secure the privilege of putting her into her little brougham.
But she avoided them all, and sprang in as if she had not been dancing for four hours, and throwing herself back into the corner, exclaimed:
"Thank goodness, that is over. Poor old Fellowes! you are worn out. Confess it."
"I am rather tired, my dear," said Mrs. Fellowes, who had been sitting against a wall all the evening.
"Tired! of course you are; it's ever so much more tiring looking on than dancing, and joining in the giddy round. I don't feel a bit tired; I'm a little bored."
"Bored! what a word, my dear Bell," murmured Mrs. Fellowes, sleepily.
"It's a good word--it's an expressive word--and it just means really what I feel."
"And yet you received more attention than any woman--any girl--in the room, my dear," murmured Mrs. Fellowes.
"My money-bags may have done so," said Lady Bell, scornfully; "not I. Do you think that if I were as penniless as one of Lady Southerly's daughters, I should receive as much attention? Fellowes, don't you take to flattering me. I couldn't stand that."
"I don't want to flatter you, my dear Bell; but when the prince himself dances twice with you----"
"Of course he did. I am a celebrity. I am the richest young woman in the kingdom, and he would have done it if I had been as ugly as sin--which isn't ugly, by the way."
"What strange things you say," murmured Mrs. Fellowes, with mild rebuke. "I'm sure no girl received more attention than you have tonight. I sat and watched you, my dear, and a spectator sees more of the game than a player."