She had received them with her usual well-bred indifference, and they had gone away under the impression that she regarded herself as restored to society by this great match that her daughter was making.

Lady Winterbourne had been shyly and therefore formidably kind to her; and both Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn had been genuinely interested in smoothing the effort to her as much as they could.

She meanwhile watched Marcella--except through the encounter with Lord Wandle, which she did not see--and found some real pleasure in talking both to Aldous and to Hallin.
Yet all through she was preoccupied, and towards the end very anxious to get home, a state of mind which prevented her from noticing Marcella's changed looks after her reappearance with Aldous in the ball-room, as closely as she otherwise might have done.

Yet the mother _had_ observed that the end of Marcella's progress had been somewhat different from the beginning; that the girl's greetings had been gentler, her smiles softer; and that in particular she had taken some pains, some wistful pains, to make Hallin talk to her.

Lord Maxwell--ignorant of the Wandle incident--was charmed with her, and openly said so, both to the mother and Lady Winterbourne, in his hearty old man's way.