June dressed herself for the ball that night as for a crisis. She had ordered a new gown, and sheathed in its glimmering whiteness, with filmy skirts falling from her hips to the floor in vaporous layers, was an ethereally fairy-like figure. Like many women who are not handsome but possess a delicate charm of appearance, she varied singularly in looks. To-night the evanescent beauty, that was now and then hers, revisited her. She was not the blushing, soft-eyed girl that Barclay had kissed in the woods at San Mateo, but a graceful woman in whose fragile elegance there was something spiritual and poetic. She noticed her pallor and accentuated it with powder, rubbing it along her shoulders till they looked like marble. In all this luminous whiteness of skin and raiment her lips were unusually red, her eyes dark and brilliant. She scrutinized herself in the mirror, drew down tendrils of hair from the coil that now crowned her head, studied her profile and coiffure in the hand glass and tried different jeweled pendants round her neck. She was like a general before battle who reviews his resources and tries to display them to the best advantage. Owing to a delay in the arrival of the carriage they were late. It was half-past ten--an unwonted hour for those days--when they entered the house. At its wide-flung portals currents of revelry and joy seemed to meet them. There was the suggestion of festival in the air; the rhythm of dance music swelled and faded over the hum of voices. Room opened from room with glimpses of polished floors between long trains, reflections of bare shoulders in mirrors, gleams of diamonds, sharp and sudden under the even flood of light from the chandeliers. Over all hung the perfume of flowers, great masses of which stood banked in corners, or hung in thick festoons along the walls. The Colonel escorted his charges to the end of the drawing-room where Stanley Davenport’s fiancée stood beside the hostess receiving guests and congratulations. Their few sentences of greeting accomplished, they moved aside toward the wide door of entrance. From this vantage point their eyes were instantly attracted by the figure of Mercedes Gracey surrounded by a little group of admirers. In the full panoply of ball dress the young woman was truly magnificent. Black Dan’s last gift was a fitting crown for such a head. She was profusely bejeweled, exceedingly bare as to neck and shoulders, and robed in a sparkling splendor of lace traced out and weighted with silver which looked like a symbolic incarnation of the riches she represented. She was brilliantly animated, turning her head this way and that as the members of the little court pressed on her notice. Rosamund, who was very quick to notice significant details, was struck by the fact that there were nearly as many women as men about her.