When Elizabeth went into the room, watchfully attended by the major, who was deeply interested in her proceedings, she was perhaps the happiest woman of all that gala company. She was in love, and she was going to meet her lover--which things meant to her something different from what they mean to girls brought up in conventional habits of thought. Eve in the Garden of Eden could not have been more pure and unsophisticated, more absolutely natural, more warmly human, more blindly confiding and incautious than she; therefore she had obeyed her strongest instinct without hesitation or reserve, and had given herself up to the delight of loving without thought of cost or consequences. Where her affections were concerned she was incapable of compromise or calculation; it was only the noble and simple rectitude that was the foundation of her character and education which could "save her from herself," as we call it, and that only in the last extremity. Just now she was in the full flood-tide, and she let herself go with it without an effort. Adam's "graceful consort" could not have had a more primitive notion of what was appropriate and expected of her under the circumstances. She stood in the brilliant ball-room, without a particle of self-consciousness, in an attitude of unaffected dignity, and with a radiance of gentle happiness all over her, that made her beautiful to look at, though she was not technically beautiful. The major watched her with profound interest, reading her like an open book; he knew what was happening, and what was going to happen (he mostly did), though he had a habit of keeping his own counsel about his own discoveries. He noted her pose, which, besides being so admirably graceful, so evidently implied expectancy; the way she held her flowers to her breast, her chin just touched by the fringes of maiden-hair, while she gently turned her head from side to side. And he saw her lift her eyes to the gallery, saw at the same moment a light spread over her face that had a superficial resemblance to a smile, though her sensitive mouth never changed its expression of firm repose; and, chuckling silently to himself, he walked away to find a sofa for his wife. Presently Mrs. Duff-Scott, suitably enthroned, and with her younger girls already carried off by her husband from her side, saw Mr. Yelverton approaching her, and rejoiced at the prospect of securing his society for herself and having the tedium of the chaperon's inactivity relieved by sensible conversation. "Ah, so you are here!" she exclaimed cordially; "I thought balls were things quite out of your line." "So they are," he said, shaking hands with her and Elizabeth impartially, without a glance at the latter. "But I consider it a duty to investigate the customs of the country. I like to look all round when I am about it." "Quite right. This is distinctly one of our institutions, and I am very glad you are not above taking notice of it."