mark the trouble in her face.

"When I left England," he said slowly, "people were dancing the tango.
That is--one couple which knew the dance, was dancing it in the
ball-room, and all the others were practising in the passage. That's
done with, I suppose?"

"Quite," said Joan.

Harry Luttrell heaved a sigh.

"I should have liked to have practised with you in the passage," he said
ruefully.

"Still, there are other dances," Joan Whitworth suggested. "The
one-step?"

"That's going for a walk," said Harry Luttrell.

"In an unusual attitude," Joan added demurely. "Do you know the
fox-trot?"

"A little."

"The twinkle step?"

"Not at all."

"I might teach you that," Joan suggested.

"Oh, do! Teach it me now! Then we'll dance it in the passage."

"But every one will be dancing it in the ball-room," Joan objected.

"That's why," said Harry Luttrell, and they both laughed.

Joan looked towards the gramophone in the corner of the room. She was
tempted, but she must have that letter written first. She would dance
with Harry Luttrell with an uneasy mind unless that letter were written
and posted first.

"Will you put a record ready on the gramophone, whilst I write a note,"
she suggested. "Then I'll teach you. It's quite a short note."

Joan sat in her turn at the writing table. She wrote the first lines
easily and quickly enough. But she came to explanations, and of
explanations she had none to offer. She sat and framed a sentence and it
would not do. Meanwhile the gramophone was open and ready, the record
fitted on to the disc of green baize and her cavalier in impatient
attendance. She must be quick. But the quicker she wanted to be, the
more slowly her thoughts moved amongst awkward sentences which she must
write. She dashed off in the end the standard phrase for such
emergencies. "I will write to you to-morrow," addressed and stamped her
letter and dropped it into the letter box. The letter fell in the glass
box with the address uppermost. But Joan did not trouble about that, did
not even notice it; a weight was off her mind.

"I am ready," she said, and a few seconds later the music of "The Long
Trail" was wafted to the astonished ears of the tennis players in the
garden. They paused in their game and then Dennis Brown crept to the
window of the hall and looked cautiously in. He stood transfixed; then
turned and beckoned furiously. The lawn-tennis players forsook their
rackets, Lady Splay and Stella