s dressed in the latest fashion--no furbished-up gown from the hands
of her maid, but a unique creation from Bond Street.

"Well," she asked in a low voice, as she handed him her programme, "are
you pleased with it?"

"Eminently so."

She glanced down at her own dress. It was not the nervous glance of the
debutante, but the practised flash of experienced eyes which see without
appearing to look.

"I am glad," she murmured.

He handed her back the card with the orthodox smile and bow of
gratitude, but there was something more in his eyes.

"Is that what you did it for?" he inquired.

"Of course," with a glance half coquettish, half humble.

She took the card and allowed it to drop pendent from her fan without
looking at it. He had written nothing on it. This was all a form. The
dances that were his had been inscribed on the engagement-card long
before by smaller fingers than his.

She turned to take her attendant partner's arm with a little flaunt--a
little movement of the hips to bring her dress, and possibly herself,
more prominently beneath Jack Meredith's notice. His eyes followed her
with that incomparably pleasant society smile which he had no doubt
inherited from his father. Then he turned and mingled with the
well-dressed throng, bowing where he ought to bow--asking with fervour
for dances in plain but influential quarters where dances were to be
easily obtained.

And all the while his father and Lady Cantourne watched.

"Yes, I THINK," the lady was saying, "that that is the favoured one."

"I fear so."

"I noticed," observed Lady Cantourne, "that he asked for a dance."

"And apparently got one--or more."

"Apparently so, Sir John."

"Moreover--"

Lady Cantourne turned on him with her usual vivacity.

"Moreover?" she repeated.

"He did not need to write it down on the card; it was written there
already."

She closed her fan with a faint smile

"I sometimes wonder," she said, "whether, in our young days, you were so
preternaturally observant as you are now."

"No," he answered, "I was not. I affected scales of the very opaquest
description, like the rest of my kind."

In the meantime this man's son was going about his business with a
leisurely savoir-faire which few could rival. Jack Meredith was the
beau-ideal of the society man in the best acceptation of the word. One
met him wherever the best people congregated, and he invariably seemed
to know what to do and how to do it better t