bout him.
I have no intelligence where he is concerned--only a strong, stupid
feeling, which is not like a feeling of my own. I am no longer Betty
Vanderpoel--and I wish to go on dancing with him--on and on--to the last
note, as he said."

She felt a little hot wave run over her cheek uncomfortably, and the
next instant the big arm tightened its clasp of her--for just one
second--not more than one. She did not know that he, himself, had seen
the sudden ripple of red colour, and that the equally sudden contraction
of the arm had been as unexpected to him and as involuntary as the quick
wave itself. It had horrified and made him angry. He looked the next
instant entirely stiff and cold.

"He did not know it happened," Betty resolved.

"The music is going to stop," said Mount Dunstan. "I know the waltz. We
can get once round the room again before the final chord. It was to be
the last note--the very last," but he said it quite rigidly, and Betty
laughed.

"Quite the last," she answered.

The music hastened a little, and their gliding whirl became more
rapid--a little faster--a little faster still--a running sweep of notes,
a big, terminating harmony, and the thing was over.

"Thank you," said Mount Dunstan. "One will have it to remember." And his
tone was slightly sardonic.

"Yes," Betty acquiesced politely.

"Oh, not you. Only I. I have never waltzed before."

Betty turned to look at him curiously.

"Under circumstances such as these," he explained. "I learned to dance
at a particularly hideous boys' school in France. I abhorred it. And
the trend of my life has made it quite easy for me to keep my
twelve-year-old vow that I would never dance after I left the place,
unless I WANTED to do it, and that, especially, nothing should make
me waltz until certain agreeable conditions were fulfilled. Waltzing I
approved of--out of hideous schools. I was a pig-headed, objectionable
child. I detested myself even, then."

Betty's composure returned to her.

"I am trusting," she remarked, "that I may secretly regard myself as
one of the agreeable conditions to be fulfilled. Do not dispel my hopes
roughly."

"I will not," he answered. "You are, in fact, several of them."

"One breathes with much greater freedom," she responded.

This sort of cool nonsense was safe. It dispelled feelings of tenseness,
and carried them to the place where Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers
awaited them. A slight stir was beginning to be fel