Miss Ogilvy was petite, with excellent features and slanting black eyes that gave her countenance a slightly Oriental cast. She wore her black hair in smooth bands over her ears, à la Victoria, and her complexion was as transparently white as only a West Indian's can be. To-night she pirouetted before the pier glass with much complacency. She wore a full flowing skirt of pink satin, with little flounces of lace and rosettes on the front, puffed tight sleeves, and a corsage of white illusion, pink bands, flowers, and rosettes. As she settled a wreath of pink rosebuds on her head and wriggled her shoulders still higher above her bodice, she felt disposed to hum a tune. She was but nineteen and Lady Mary was twenty-nine if she was a day.
Anne, who had been assisting Mrs. Nunn's maid to adjust lavender satin folds and the best point lace shawl, entered at the moment and was greeted with rapture.
"Dearest Miss Percy! What a vision! A Nereid! A Lorelei! You will extinguish us all. Poor Lord Hunsdon. Poor Mr. Warner--ah, ma belle, I have eyes in my head. But what a joy to see you in colour. How does it happen?"
"My aunt insisted while we were in London that I buy one or two coloured gowns. My father has been dead more than a year. I put this on to-night to please her, although I have two white evening gowns."
She wore green taffeta flowing open in front over a white embroidered muslin slip, and trimmed with white fringe. A sash whose fringed ends hung down in front, girt her small waist. Her arms and neck were bare, but slipping from the shoulders, carelessly held in the fashion of the day, was a white crêpe scarf fringed with green. She wore her hair in the usual bunch of curls on either side of her face, but in a higher knot than usual, and had bound her head with the golden fillet Mrs. Nunn had pressed upon her in London. Depending from it and resting on her forehead, was an oblong emerald; Anne had a few family jewels although she wore no others to-night.
"I vow!" continued Miss Ogilvy, tripping about her, "quite classic! And at the same time such style! Such ton! Madame Lucille made that gown. Am I not right?"
Anne confessed that Madame Celeste had made it.
"Celeste, I meant. How could I be so stupid? But it is two long years since I laid eyes on Bond Street. A humbler person, plain Mrs. Barclay, sends out my gowns. What do you think, dear Miss Percy, shall I look provincial, second-rate, amongst all these lucky people of fashion?"