g afraid. "What is it? Is she ill,
Harry?"

"Come and talk to Norah."

"No, we'll go straight home."

"But she's not there, Minna. That's all Norah'll say to me, but she's
got some idea where she is, and says she'll tell you. Judith isn't
there."

"It must be nearly morning."

"It's two."

"It was after nine when we started."

"Minna, didn't you hear what I said?"

Mrs. Randall's face had not changed as she heard; it looked
unchangeable, like some fixed but charming mask that she wore. The lips
still smiled though they had stiffened slightly, and she watched the two
women's attempts to blindfold the Colonel--unaided now, but hilariously
applauded by the circle around her--with the same mild, interested eyes,
wide-set and Madonna calm.

"I tell you, Judith's not there. What does Norah know? Why don't you do
something? Where is she?... My God, look at them. What are they doing
now? Look at Everard."

Mrs. Burr had drawn the knot suddenly tight in the white scarf she was
manipulating, and slipped out of the Colonel's arms and out of reach. He
followed, and then swung round and stumbled awkwardly after Edith Kent,
who had brushed past him, leaving a light, challenging kiss on his
forehead, and was further guiding him with her pretty, empty laugh. The
game of blind-man's buff was under way.

Crowding the garden enclosure, swaying this way and that and threatening
to overflow it, a pushing, struggling mass of people kept rather
laboriously out of one another's way and the Colonel's, not so much
amused by the effort as they were pretending to be; people with heavy
and stupid faces who had never looked more irrevocably removed from
childhood than now that they were playing a children's game.

In the heart of the crowd, now plunging ahead of it, now lost in it, the
first gentleman of Green River disported himself. His white head was
easy to follow through the crowd, and the thing that made you follow it
was evident even now--much of his old dignity, and the charm that was
peculiarly his; you saw it in an occasional stubborn shake of his
beautifully shaped head, in the grace of the hand that caught at some
flying skirt and missed it. He was the first gentleman of Green River
still, but he was something else.

His white hair straggled across his forehead moist and dishevelled, and
his face showed flushed and perspiring against the white of the scarf.
The trailing ends of the scarf flapped grotesquely about his he