Ginny gathered her dress, its pink sea of silken foam cascading to her dyed high heels in beautiful, rippling waves

Outside, the sky rolled by in thick, rolls of blue. The houses rose against the skyline like expensive toys, magnificent but flawless - devastatingly plastic - in each detail.

She pushed aside a curtain and almost peeked out, before she realized – thankfully, in time – that that, too, was a most unladylike act, and that if anyone saw her do so, Aunt Muriel would think of it what Fred and George thought of Percy singing in the shower.

Lights burned from the windows of the mansion, but they were dimmed by the wave of illumination that curled into twists in the confines of the vast, beautifully-kept gardens: it seemed that others had already arrived, and their presence made her shift slightly uncomfortably, for they were clearly men and women of high repute, none of whom seemed to have landed here by a stroke of luck – and, of course, the persistence of a mother who was a little plump, loved her children dearly, and had once thrown a shoe at a gnome and ended up thwacking her husband on the head, instead.

The moment that carriage reached back to the mansion, she was dead.

Dead.

Deader than Merlin's fat pink cat had been, when the Merlin in Ron's self-invented, baby-time story had realized that it had chewed through Merlin's favourite set of underpants.

DEADER than Fred and George had been, when they had sneaked into Great Aunt Muriel's temporary bedroom at the Burrow in the middle of the night and realized, just when they had been about to sneak back out after replacing the Great Aunt's solemn, brown slippers with fuzzy, neon blue bunny ones that could make any amount of immature, rude faces, that Aunt Muriel was standing in the doorway.

Glad for the refuge, she came to a silent stand beneath it and, from a distance, any onlooker would have been breathless, had they looked at her, right then -- for the moonlight washed down on her, filtered into quiet silver by the splendid canopy of moonlit leaves overhead, and it brought out the glow of her dress, the brown of her eyes, the precise yet gentle cut of her face -- danced across the red of her hair in a way that made one unable to look for her faults - which there definitely were, though the scene then had little, if any, place for them -- in a way that made one want to touch her to see if she was real, or a doll or a dream.

It was the moment Lord Rostov saw her.