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The tableaux had taken place to everybody’s satisfaction. There had been much applause, and Joyce had been called for to receive the thanks of the audience; but all muffled up in a dark cloak in which she had figured as one of Queen Margaret’s travelling retinue, she had not revealed anything to the amused look of the gentlemen and ladies who were spectators, except a dark and indistinct outline against the light. When the others, throwing off the veils and cloaks in which she had enveloped them, joined their friends in the drawing-room, which was to Joyce the emblem of everything that was most splendid and beautiful in the world, she stole away, getting her hat from Merritt’s room. Merritt would gladly have detained her for a gossip afterwards; but Joyce, though she told herself with an angry humility, which was more stinging than pride, that it was Merritt who was her equal and not Greta, would not stay. She went out into the silence of the night, hearing the voices of the company, with a keen desire to know what they were saying, and to share in the enjoyment which imagination represented to her as so much more delightful than any kind of social intercourse she had ever known. Joyce felt this with a sharp and keen sensation which she said to herself was not envy. Oh no, no! for envy is unkind, whereas she desired no harm, but only good and every pleasantness to the delightsome company where there were so many whom she was fond of; but only a forlorn consciousness of her own position as one who could not get access there, yet was at home nowhere else. No; all that youthful folly about Lady Joyce was nonsense, she knew. She would never be Lady Joyce, never find a place in the Queen’s Court, or among the people who are grand and great, and the flower of the land; but yet there was her place, and nowhere else was she at home.