When they had given three cheers and were sipping from their glasses, Mrs. Melville had said drolly: "Did ye happen to notice my arm when I was lifting it? Ye did not, ye vain wee thing, ye were looking at yourself all the time. But I'll give ye one more chance." And she had held it up so that her loose sleeve (she was wearing a very handsome mauve tea-gown bought by Mr. Melville in the temporary delirium of his honeymoon, from which he had so completely recovered that she never got another) fell back to her shoulder. "Mother, I never knew you had arms like that!" She had never before seen them except when they were covered by an ill-fitting sleeve or, if they had been bare to the elbow, uninvitingly terminating in a pair of housemaid's gloves or hands steamy with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing ...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which, since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are about work that springs from aesthetic principles different from their own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.