With a rapidity which was a marvel to all her girl friends, Gail had slipped upstairs and into a creamy lace evening frock without having been missed; and she was in this acutely harmonious setting when the Reverend Smith Boyd called, with his beautiful mother on his arm. The beautiful mother was in an exceptional flurry of delight to see Gail, and kissed that charming young lady with clinging warmth. The rector’s eyes were even more strikingly changed than they had been when he had first met her on the steps, as they looked on Gail in her creamy lace, and after she had read that new intense look in his eyes for the second time that evening, she hurried away, with the license of a busy hostess, and cooled her face at an open window in the side vestibule. There was a new note in the Reverend Smith Boyd’s voice; not a greater depth nor mellowness nor sweetness, but a something else. What was it? It was a call, that was it; a call across the gulf of futurity.
They came after her. Ted and Lucile had arrived. She was in a vortex. Dick Rodley hemmed her in a corner, and proposed to her again, just for practice, within eye-shot of a dozen people, and he did it so that onlookers might think that he was complimenting her on her clever coiffure or discussing a new operetta; but he made her blush, which was the intention in the depths of his black eyes. It seemed that she was in a perpetual blush to-night, and something within her seemed to be surging and halting and wavering and quivering! Her Aunt Helen Davies, rather early in the evening, began to act stiff and formal.
“Go home,” she murmured to Lucile. “All this excitement is bad for Gail’s beauty.”
She felt free to give the same advice to the gay little Mrs. Babbitt, and the departure of four people was sufficient to remind the stiff Van Ploon daughter of the conventions. She removed the elder Van Ploon’s eyes from Gail, and gathered up Houston, who was energetically talking horse with Allison. After that the exodus became general, until only the callow youth and Allison and the Reverend Smith Boyd remained. The latter young gentleman had taken his flutteringly happy mother home early in the evening, and he had resorted to dulness with such of the thinning guests as had seemed disposed to linger.