ater on," he said, with an amused laugh. "I
must go now, and translate myself into Charles Surface, or I'll be
late."

Left alone again, she turned back to her looking-glass and sighed; but
a single glance at it comforted her surprisingly.

"He was in a hurry," she reflected, by way of further consolation,
"and I've got four dances with him after all."

* * * * *

Theo Desmond inscribed few names on his programme beyond those of his
wife, Mrs Olliver, and Honor Meredith.

"You must let me have a good few dances, Honor," he said to her, "and
hang Mrs Grundy! We are outsiders here, and you and I understand one
another."

She surrendered her programme with smiling submission. "Do you always
order people to give you dances in that imperative fashion?"

"Only when I'm set on having them, and daren't risk refusal! I'll go
one better than Paul, if I may. I didn't know he had it in him to be
so grasping."

And he returned the card on which the initials P. W. appeared four
times in Wyndham's neat handwriting.

Never, in all his days had Paul asked a woman to give him four dances;
and as he claimed Honor for the first of them, he wondered whether his
new-found boldness would carry him farther still. Her beauty and
graciousness, her enthusiasm over the afternoon's triumph, exalted him
from the sober levels of patience and modesty to unscaled heights of
aspiration. But not until their second valse together did an opening
for speech present itself.

They had deserted the packed moving mass, in whose midst dancing was
little more than a promenade under difficulties, and stood aside in
an alcove that opened off the ballroom.

"Look at Evelyn. Isn't she charming in that dress?" Honor exclaimed,
as the Golden Butterfly whirled past, like an incarnate sunbeam, in
her husband's arms. "I feel a Methuselah when I see how freshly and
rapturously she is enjoying it all. This is my seventh Commission
Ball, Major Wyndham! No doubt most people think it high time I hid my
diminished head in England. But my head refuses to feel
diminished,"--she lifted it a little in speaking,--"and I prefer to
remain where I am."

"On the Border?"

"Yes. On the Border for choice."

"You were keen to get there, I remember," he said, restraining his
eagerness. "And you are not disappointed, after nine months of it?"

"Disappointed?--I think they have been almost the best months of my
life."

She spoke with sudde