The Ladies Lindores by Margaret Oliphant

The ball was in full career; everybody had come to it from all the houses within reach, and the radius was wide -- extending over the whole county. It was universally acknowledged that nobody could have imagined the drawing-room at Dalrulzian to be so large -- and though the mothers and the old ladies were in a great state of alarm as to the facilities for stepping forth through the long windows after a dance, yet the young people, indifferent to the northern chill which they had been used to all their lives, considered the Walk, which seemed almost a portion of the room, to be the most delightful of all. Rintoul, though with many protestations and much scorn of the little rustic assembly, had been persuaded to wait for it, and was an object of attraction as great as -- nay, in some respects greater than -- John himself. There were no great young ladies in the company for whom it was worth his while to exert himself, and consequently the young man yielded to the soft flattery of all the pleased and grateful faces around him, and made himself agreeable in general, ending, however, almost invariably at the side of Nora, to whom it was a pleasing compensation for the indifference of the young master of Dalrulzian, who had been so distinctly destined for her by the country. John was very civil to Nora. He went out of his way, indeed, to be civil. He took her about the house, into the library, and the hall, to show her the alterations he was making, and appealed to her about their propriety in a way which Nora felt might have taken in some girls. But she was not taken in. She knew it was merely politeness, and that John would go away as soon as he had done his duty with a certain sense of relief. But Rintoul's attentions were paid in a very different spirit. He asked her to dance as many times as he could without attracting too much notice. Nora felt that he discriminated this line finely, and was half provoked and half flattered by it, feeling acutely that whereas John Erskine did his best to show her all the civility which his position required, Rintoul went against all the duties of his position to get near her, to talk to her in a corner, to devote to her every moment which he could devote to her without remark. He was very careful, very desirous not to commit himself with society; but to Nora, every tone of his voice, every look committed him. She felt -- she was a great deal cleverer than Rintoul, and saw through and through him -- that to her he was a totally different person from the young man of fashion, who, with a touch of condescension, did his duty to the other young ladies. She saw him in a different light. He toned his words for her. He changed his very sentiments. She was pleased and amused, and at the same time touched, when (for she was too clever) she noted this change coming over him in the middle of a sentence, in the figure of a dance, when he suddenly found himself near her. There could not have been a more complete proof of these sentiments which he was as yet afraid to indulge in, which vanquished him against his will. A girl's pride may be roused by the idea that a man struggles against her power over him, and is unwilling to love her; but at the same time there is a wonderful flattery in the consciousness that his unwillingness avails him nothing, and that reason is powerless in comparison with love. Nora with her keen eyes marked how, when the young man left her to dance or to talk with someone else, he kept, as it were, one eye upon her, watching her partners and her behaviour -- and how, the moment he was free, he would gyrate round her, with something which (within herself, always laughing, yet not displeased) she compared to the flutterings of a bird beating its wings against the air, resisting yet compelled to approach some centre of fascination. He would have kept away if he could, but he was not able. She was so much occupied in watching these proceedings of his -- seeing the humour of them so completely that she was fain to put her head out at the window, or retire into a corner of the hall, to laugh privately to herself -- that she lost the thread of much that was said to her, and sadly wounded the feelings of several of the young officers from Dundee. What they said was as a murmur in her ears, while her mind was engaged in the more amusing study -- watching the movements of Rintoul.