‘I don’t know that I shall enjoy this ball much; but I am not above dancing--and I enjoy _this_,’ she said. ‘I like to be doing something.’ To have regained her own sense of self-command, her superiority to circumstances, made this magnanimous young woman happy in her downfall. She liked the knowledge that she was magnanimous almost more than the good fortune and prosperity which she had lost. She had got over her misfortunes. She gave her head a little toss aloft, shaking off all shadows, as she ran hither and thither, the soul of everything. She had got the upper hand of fate. As for Mr. Mountford, he had a great deal more patience about the details of the approaching entertainment when Anne took them in hand. Either she managed to make them amusing to him, or the additional reality in the whole matter, from the moment she put herself at the head of affairs, had a corresponding effect upon her father. Perhaps, indeed, a little feeling of making up to her, by a more than ordinary readiness to accept all her lesser desires, was in his mind. His moroseness melted away. He forgot his alarm about his health and Mr. Loseby’s ugly words. It is possible, indeed, that he might have succeeded in forgetting altogether what he had done, or at least regaining his feeling that it was a mere expedient to overawe Anne and bring her into order, liable to be changed as everything changes--even wills, when there are long years before the testator--but for the two sealed envelopes in his drawer which he could not help seeing every time he opened it. A day or two before the ball some business called him into Hunston, and he took them out with a half smile, weighing them in his hand. Should he carry them with him and put them in Loseby’s charge? or should he leave them there? He half laughed at the ridiculous expedient to which Loseby’s words had driven him, and looked at the two letters jocularly; but in the end he determined to take them, it would be as well to put them in old Loseby’s hands. Heathcote volunteered to ride with him as he had done before. It was again a bright calm day, changed only in so far as November is different from October. There had been stormy weather in the meantime, and the trees were almost bare; but still it was fine and bright. Anne came out from the hall and stood on the steps to see them ride off. She gave them several commissions: to inquire at the bookseller’s for the ball programmes, and to carry to the haberdasher’s a note of something Mrs. Worth wanted. She kissed her hand to her father as he rode away, and his penitent heart gave him a prick. ‘You would not think that was a girl that had just been cut off with a shilling,’ he said, half mournfully (as if it had been a painful necessity), and half with parental braggadocio, proud of her pluck and spirit. ‘I thought you must have changed your mind,’ Heathcote said. Mr. Mountford shook his head and said, ‘No, worse luck. I have not changed my mind.’