Page:The Smart Set (Volume 52, Number 4).djvu/15

of pleasure. He cast his eyes on the beautiful Mrs. Buxton, who was now engrossed with a pink and white youth in smart riding kit, a youth with indeterminate features and pale hair. It was well enough that she should talk to Colman. He had made a name and was rich besides, and good looking enough, but this hateful lad with white eyelashes angered him. He was annoyed at the insistence with which the favored youth looked at him. It seemed to Horace to be a stare that said no Bowlerville representative had a right on the private field of a millionaire where polo was in progress and the aristocracies of America and Europe mixed.

The favored youth, so far from resenting Blackwell’s presence, was sighing in secret that he lacked his stature and looks. This aloof stranger wearing regimental colors was probably one of the companions of the cavalry officers who had come to lift the cup.

He envied them their superb horsemanship and thought unkindly of a mother who had feared for his safety too much to let him learn the art of equitation until it was too late for him to get even a fair seat. Mrs. Hamilton Buxton followed his sober glances and rested her magnificent eyes on the stranger. He was uncommonly good looking, she thought. Half a dozen years ago, perhaps it was more, there had been a Roman prince who looked like him and had the same rather melancholy eves and the same beautiful tapering white hands.

“Who is that man?” she asked abruptly.

“I don’t know,” Duff McGregor answered. “I thought you'd know. You know every good looking man and, fortunately for me, some plain ones. Perhaps he’s one of these cavalry fellows. They're swarming over.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “One can always tell a cavalryman by his walk. He's not bred to the sabre and saddle.”

Horace sensed that it was about him they talked and the knowledge brought him little pleasure. In avoiding their glances he caught sight of Effie Horton. He felt he had had enough scrutiny and stepped over the board that guarded the enclosed field to walk to the other side of the grounds.

But as he neared Lord Minster and the two to whom he talked the interval was ended and the grooms led out the ponies. There was no time to cross. He must perforce turn back and meet the unsympathetic eves of those who judged him hardly. There had always been the dislike in his nature to make a fool of himself. Perhaps that was why his life had been tinged with a certain melancholy. He took a sudden and surprising resolve. He was abreast of the lady in white. Effie was staggered when she saw him raise his hat and address her.

“Is Captain Leslie very badly hurt?” he asked.

The lady to whom he spoke had met so much hospitality since her arrival and was besides related by marriage to several American families that she supposed this was one of the many nice young Americans she had met at a dance or a dinner, at Meadowbrook or Piping Rock, whose name she ought to remember but unfortunately could not call to mind.

“They don't know yet,” she answered graciously, “but they’re afraid his nose is broken. Isn’t it a frightful nuisance?”’

He uttered some word of conventional condolence and walked with her to the board, where he raised his hat and bowed to them both, the woman in white and the dark little man with her. That was all. But Effie had seen; and not Effie alone. Mrs. Hamilton Buxton had observed him, and this time she did not look clear through him.

Effie could not keep up her air of dignity when she wanted badly to find out how he had come to know these names already in her list of notables at a distinguished gathering.

“How did you know them?” she demanded.

“Know whom?” he repeated.