‘That may be,’ said Lady William, ‘but it is one thing to refuse a partner and another nearly to knock him down.’ ‘Oh, did we knock him down?’ said Mab, delighted, and softly clapping her hands. She was disappointed to hear that he had not been knocked down at all, but was standing in a corner of the room very sulky, and vowing vengeance upon the little fat thing who had rejected his condescending offer. When, however, the Rectory girls and some others surrounded her open-mouthed, to hear what it all meant, Mab took higher ground. ‘If I hadn’t snubbed him,’ she said, ‘Jim would have punched his head, or something. He told me he would not stand it, so I thought it better a girl should do it than a boy. He may sulk, but he cannot do anything to me. And what do I care for his sulking? He cannot dance a bit,’ said this high-handed young lady, who had not a dance, not even an extra, to give to any one; others who were not so deeply engaged did not, perhaps, feel themselves so free. They surrounded her, however, with a certain wondering admiration, and those girls who were not acquainted with Bobby Wade, and who had hitherto been a little ashamed of the fact, now proclaimed it as a superiority. ‘He is such bad form,’ they all said. It need scarcely be said that there were other things in Lady William’s mind than even her child’s success, as she stood up in her corner watching the dancers. It would be to do great injustice to Mrs. FitzStephen, a woman of very good connections, and who had taken so much trouble to make her party everything that a party in a village, out of London, out of the great world, could be, to say that it was in any sense of the word common or inferior. They were all very nice people, some even, as has been seen, from the county, for Bobby Wade had brought his sisters with him, who really gave themselves no airs at all among the village folk, though they did what they could to appropriate Leo, and gave him to understand that he was the only man in the least degree of their own set. But Lady William, as she looked round the room, was haunted by an altogether unreasonable regret and discomfort, which she was indignant with herself for feeling, but which came into her mind in spite of her. This was not the scene, she said to herself, in which Mab should be making her first acquaintance with the world. Then, why not? her self said to her, hotly. It would have been far better for Mab’s mother if she had never known any other; if she had looked forward to an innocent dance in the village as her greatest pleasure, and never stepped out of that simple circle. Ah, but she had done so, the other visionary party in the argument said. She had stepped out of that circle, and her daughter was Lord William Pakenham’s daughter as well as hers: and was it not a wrong to Mab that she should be here where everybody looked up to the Wades, people who were of no particular importance, whose origin could not be compared to hers? These things