With a feeling of bewildered pain, she gradually became aware that James Berwick, without appearing to do so, avoided finding himself in her company. She saw him talking eagerly, first to this woman, and then to that; at one moment bending over the armchair of an important dowager, and then dancing--yes, actually dancing--with Lucy Kemp. She also could not help observing that he was very often in the neighbourhood of the woman who, Barbara acknowledged to herself, was the beauty of the ball, a certain Mrs. Marshall, whose radiant fairness was enhanced by a black tulle and jet gown, and who was--so Mr. Daman informed her with a chuckle--but a newly-made widow. And in truth something seemed to hold Berwick, as if by magic, to the floor of the ball-room. He did not wander off, as did everybody else, either alone or in company, to any of the pretty side-rooms which had been arranged for sitting out, or into the long, book-lined gallery; and yet Mrs. Rebell had now and again caught his glance fixed on her, his eyes studiously emptied of expression. To avoid that strange alien gaze, she had retreated more than once into the gallery, but the ball-room seemed to draw her also, or else her companions--the shadow-like men and women who seemed to be brought up to her in an endless procession, and to whom she heard herself saying she hardly knew what--were in a conspiracy to force her back to where she could not help seeing Berwick. Oh! how ardently Barbara wished that the evening would draw to a close. It was good to remember that Mrs. Boringdon and Lucy had both expressed a strong desire to leave early. Soon her martyrdom, for so in truth it was, would cease, and so also, with this experience--this sudden light thrown down into the depths of her own heart--would cease her intimacy with James Berwick. The anguish she felt herself enduring frightened her. What right had this man, who was after all but a friend and a friend of short standing, to make her feel this intolerable pain, and, what was to such a nature as hers more bitter, such humiliation? There assailed her that instinct of self-preservation which makes itself felt in certain natures, even in the rarefied atmosphere of exalted passion. She must, after to-night, save herself from the possible repetition of such feelings as those which now possessed her. She told herself that those past afternoons and evenings of close, often wordless, communion and intimacy yet gave her no lien on James Berwick's heart, no right even to his attention.