‘If you were a better Shakespearian it would occur to you that Shylock got nothing,’ retorted Daphne, smiling up at him. ‘He was an old idiot. Remember, the first extra valse. We shall meet at Philippi.’ He was off to claim Lina for the Lancers. It was the last dance before supper. Sir Vernon had disappeared ever so long ago. Mrs. Ferrers was standing up with a major of dragoons, in all the splendour of his uniform, and felt that she and her partner made an imposing picture. Edgar and Daphne were sitting out this square dance on the stairs, the girl somewhat exhausted by much waltzing, the man exalted to the seventh heaven of bliss at being permitted to bear her company. ‘May I take you down to supper?’ he asked. ‘Thanks; no. My last partner—the man in the red coat——’ ‘Clinton Chetwynd, master of the Harrowby Harriers?’ interjected Edgar. ‘Told me that the best dancing will be when two-thirds of the people are gormandising downstairs. You can get me an ice, if you like.’ Edgar obeyed; but when he came back with the ice Daphne had vanished from the landing, and he got himself entangled in a block of people struggling down to supper. The rooms below—those solemn halls in which on ordinary occasions the local offender stood at the bar of justice to answer for his misdeeds—were now a scene of glitter and gaiety; flower-wreathed épergnes, barley-sugar pagodas, and all the tinselly splendour of a ball-supper. Bar, and bench, and magisterial chairs had vanished as if by magic. The magistrate’s private apartment and the justice hall had been thrown into one spacious banqueting-chamber, where even the proverbial greediness of the best society—the people who tread upon each other’s toes and rush for the grapes and peaches at Buckingham Palace—might be satisfied without undue scrambling. But though there would have been room for him at the banquet, and although there were any number of eligible young ladies waiting to be taken down, Edgar scorned the idea of a supper which Daphne did not care for. To have sat by her, squeezed into some impossible corner of a rout-seat, to have fought for lobster-salad for her, and guarded her frock from the ravages of awkward people, and pulled cracker bon-bons with her, would have been bliss; but the festal board without her would be every whit as funereal a banquet as the famous sable feast at which that cheerful practical joker Domitian entertained his courtiers. Mr. Turchill found a good-natured fox-hunter to take his mother down, and having seen that lady’s silver-gray satin—newly done up with violet velvet by Miss Piper for the occasion—making its deliberate way down the broad staircase, on the sportsman’s sturdy scarlet arm, Edgar went back to the almost empty ball-room, where about fifteen or twenty couples were revolving to the last sugary-sweet German waltz, ‘_Glaubst du nicht_?’