.

THE ALLY.
Tremayne elbowed his way through the gorgeous crowd, exchanging greetings here and there as he went, and so reached the ballroom during a pause in the dancing.

He looked round for Lady O'Moy, but he could see her nowhere, and would never have found her had not Carruthers pointed out a knot of officers and assured him that the lady was in the heart of it and in imminent peril of being suffocated.
Thither the captain bent his steps, looking neither to right nor left in his singleness of purpose.

Thus it happened that he saw neither O'Moy, who had just arrived, nor the massive, decorated bulk of Marshal Beresford, with whom the adjutant stood in conversation on the skirts of the throng that so assiduously worshipped at her ladyship's shrine.
Captain Tremayne went through the group with all a sapper's skill at piercing obstacles, and so came face to face with the lady of his quest.
Seeing her so radiant now, with sparkling eyes and ready laugh, it was difficult to conceive her haunted by any such anxieties as Miss Armytage had mentioned.

Yet the moment she perceived him, as if his presence acted as a reminder to lift her out of the delicious present, something of her gaiety underwent eclipse.
Child of impulse that she was, she gave no thought to her action and the construction it might possibly bear in the minds of men chagrined and slighted.
"Why, Ned," she cried, "you have kept me waiting." And with a complete and charming ignoring of the claims of all who had been before him, and who were warring there for precedence of one another, she took his arm in token that she yielded herself to him before even the honour was so much as solicited.
With nods and smiles to right and left--a queen dismissing her court--she passed on the captain's arm through the little crowd that gave way before her dismayed and intrigued, and so away.
O'Moy, who had been awaiting a favourable moment to present the marshal by the marshal's own request, attempted to thrust forward now with Beresford at his side.