etting frightfully mysterious," Miss Tattersall agreed, and added
inconsequently, "He's got a strong face, you know; keen--looks as if he'd
get his own way about things, though, of course, he isn't a gentleman."

I had a suspicion that she had been flirting with the romantic chauffeur.
She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one.

I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play had
become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off through the
baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and hostess were
moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.

"We might almost as well go and sit down somewhere," I suggested to Miss
Tattersall, and noted three or four accessible blanks on the staircase.

"Almost," she agreed after a glance at the closed door that shut out the
night.

In the re-arrangement I managed to leave her on a lower step, and climbed
to the throne of the gods, at present occupied only by Gordon Hughes, one
of Frank Jervaise's barrister friends from the Temple. Hughes was reputed
"brilliantly clever." He was a tallish fellow with ginger red hair and a
long nose--the foxy type.

"Rum start!" I cried, by way of testing his intellectual quality, but
before I could get on terms with him, the stage was taken by a dark,
curly-haired, handsome boy of twenty-four or so, generally addressed as
"Ronnie." I had thought him very like a well-intentioned retriever pup. I
could imagine him worrying an intellectual slipper to pieces with great
gusto.

"I say, it's all U.P. now," he said, in a dominating voice. "What's the
time?" He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with evening
dress.

Some one said it was "twenty-five to one."

"Fifty to one against another dance, then," Ronnie barked joyously.

"Unless you'll offer yourself up as a martyr in a good cause," suggested
Nora Bailey.

"Offer myself up? How?" Ronnie asked.

"Take 'em home in your car," Nora said in a penetrating whisper.

"Dead the other way," was Ronnie's too patent excuse.

"It's only a couple of miles through the Park, you know," Olive Jervaise
put in. "You might easily run them over to the vicarage and be back again
in twenty minutes."

"By Jove; yes. So I might," Ronnie acknowledged. "That is, if I may really
come back, Miss Jervaise. Awfully good of you to suggest it. I didn't
bring my man with me, though. I'll have to go and wind up the old
buzz-wagon myself, if your f