m, and he did not look away from his partner's face, though
it was not absorbingly attractive just now. The piquant profile had a
blurred look, and the cheeks were flushed under the daintily calculated
touch of rouge. Mrs. Burr turned to her friend with a faint but
relentless light of amusement in her narrowed eyes.

"Edie's had just one cocktail too many."

"Yes." They ignored the more obvious fact that the Colonel had. The
evening had reached the stage when he always had.

"He hasn't danced with you many times, Minna dear."

"I'm tired of dancing, but don't let me keep you here, Lil."

"I haven't seen him dance with you at all."

"He hasn't yet."

"No?" said Mrs. Burr, very casually.

"No. Lil, I think Ranny wants you. He's wandering about, looking vague."

"Don't you want me, dear? Well, Ranny always wants me."

Mr. Randolph Sebastian, discovering her suddenly, gave exaggerated proof
of this as he carried her off. If the Colonel's secretary had really
been recruited from a dance hall, he had profited by what he saw there,
and showed it in every quick, graceful turn he made. His partner was the
type of woman that dancing might have been invented to show off; it gave
her lazy, graciously built body a reason for being, and put a flicker of
meaning into her shallow eyes so that she was not floridly pretty any
longer, but beautiful. This was peculiarly apparent when she danced with
Mr. Sebastian. She seemed to have been created for the purpose of
dancing with him; it could not have been more apparent if their
elaborate game of devotion to each other had been real, and they were
really lovers.

Mrs. Clifford Kent, suddenly appearing alone, slipped into Mrs. Burr's
empty place. Her dance with the Colonel was over. "My Lord's in fine
form to-night," she confided without preliminary. "We're going to play
blind-man's buff after the duchess goes home." The duchess was Mrs.
Grant, the Honourable Joe's wife, still the first lady of Green River,
but the younger women were beginning to make fun of her discreetly
behind her back. "He told me the tiger story." This represented a
triumph. Getting the Colonel's smoking-room stories at first hand
instead of second hand, from their husbands, was the only form of
rivalry about which these ladies were frank with each other. "I got it
out of Cliff first, anyway. He said he couldn't tell me, but he did. I
made him. Where was Harry last night?"

"What do you mean?"

"Cliff had