The groups of
cottagers in the park were gradually diminishing, the young ones being
attracted towards the lights that were beginning to gleam from the
windows of the gallery in the abbey, which was to be their dancing-room,
and some of the sober elder ones thinking it time to go home quietly.
One of these was Lisbeth Bede, and Seth went with her--not from filial
attention only, for his conscience would not let him join in dancing.
It had been rather a melancholy day to Seth: Dinah had never been more
constantly present with him than in this scene, where everything was
so unlike her. He saw her all the more vividly after looking at the
thoughtless faces and gay-coloured dresses of the young women--just as
one feels the beauty and the greatness of a pictured Madonna the more
when it has been for a moment screened from us by a vulgar head in a
bonnet. But this presence of Dinah in his mind only helped him to bear
the better with his mother's mood, which had been becoming more and more
querulous for the last hour. Poor Lisbeth was suffering from a strange
conflict of feelings. Her joy and pride in the honour paid to her
darling son Adam was beginning to be worsted in the conflict with the
jealousy and fretfulness which had revived when Adam came to tell her
that Captain Donnithorne desired him to join the dancers in the hall.
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