u might dance with my kiddy sister for a bit. She's awfully
fond of ices, so you needn't really dance."

The friend said he preferred to remain independent at a dance.

"No, I say, do be a decent chap," begged Michael. "Just dance with her
once and get another chap to dance with her after you've had your shot.
Oh, do. Look here. What'll you swap for the whole of her programme?"

The friend considered the proposition in its commercial side.

"Look here," Michael began, and then, as he nervously half turned his
head, he saw the crowd thickening about Muriel. He waved his arm
violently in the hope that she would realize his plight and keep the
rivals at arm's length. "Look here," he went on, "you know my bat with
the whalebone splice?" This bat was Michael's most precious possession,
and even as he bartered it for love, he smelt the fragrant linseed-oil
of the steeped bandages which now preserved it for summer suns.

The friend's eyes twinkled greedily.

"I'll swap that bat," said Michael, "if you'll make sure my kiddy sister
hasn't got a single empty place on her programme all the dance."

"All right," said the friend. And as he was led up to Stella, Michael
whispered hurriedly, when the introduction had been decorously made:

"This chap's frightfully keen on you, Stella. He simply begged me to
introduce him to you."

Then from the depths of Michael's soul a deep-seated cunning inspired
him to add:

"I wouldn't at first, because he was awfully in love with another girl
and I thought it hard cheese on her, because she's here to-night. But he
said he'd go home if he didn't dance with you. So I had to."

Michael looked enquiringly at Stella, marked the smirk of satisfaction
on her lips, then recklessly, almost sliding over the polished floor, he
plunged through Muriel's suitors and proffered his programme. They
danced together nearly all the evening, and alas, Muriel told him that
she was going to boarding-school next term. It was a blow to Michael,
and the dance programme with Muriel's name fourteen times repeated was
many times looked at with sentimental pangs each night of next term
before Michael went to bed a hundred miles away from Muriel at her
boarding-school.

However, Muriel and her porcelain-blue eyes and the full bow of her lips
and the slimness and girlishness of her were forgotten in the
complexities of life at a great public school. Michael often looked back
to that first term in the Lower Third a