"Yes,--besides, yesterday evening you said that you would tell me to-day whether you were prepared to do what I suggested. We might have been well away by now."

Leonetta, who was enjoying the dance far too much to regret not being "well away by now," tried to appear absent-minded.

"I didn't say to-day--did I?" she observed.

"Oh, well, if you don't remember."

"I may have done."

"Oh, Leo, you don't really love me. You say you do, but you don't."

Nothing on earth is more wearying than an injured and protesting lover.

Better never to have been loved at all than to suffer such persecution.

"My dear boy, what do you want me to do?" she sighed.

"Be as you were three days ago--before----"

"Before what?"

"Before that man came down," Denis ejaculated with the hoarseness of rage.

She smiled, and there was a suggestion of triumph in the glint of her large canines.

"He's cured Cleo, any way," she said.

"A nice cure! The heat becomes too intense for somebody, a quack is called down, the weather cools, as it did twenty-four hours afterwards, and the quack gets the credit."

In another part of the ballroom Lord Henry and Cleopatra were trying to entertain one another, and both of them were perspiring freely from the efforts they were making.

"I think I have at last succeeded in prevailing upon the Tribes to join me on my trip to China," said Lord Henry, hoping that this subject might supply more conversation than the previous one had done.

"What will they do?"

"I must have someone, some man who is conscientious, retiring, and willing to help me and follow my directions without pushing himself forward. And Tribe is exactly the sort,--unassuming, conscientious, and meek."

"But what will become of the Inner Light?"

"I hope I shall have dealt that nonsense the severest blow it has ever received," Lord Henry exclaimed. "At any rate, Mrs. Tribe has done half the fighting for me. She is most anxious to come. Tribe is simply one of those people who have an itch to be doing some 'good work.' Give him the Inner Light or my business in China, he's just as happy. Stephen may come too."

Cleopatra purred, and looked down at her toe.

"This is a beautiful floor, isn't it?" said Lord Henry at last, when he found that the topic of the Tribes also fell completely flat.

"Quite as good as the best in town," Cleopatra replied, her lips quivering slightly. "Sir Joseph had it specially built when he bought the place."

"The band is quite good, too, for a provincial,--for a provincial sort of band," Lord Henry added.

Her eyes were still downcast. "Yes, we haven't had these before. Sir Joseph usually gets a band from Folkestone."

Meanwhile Mrs. Delarayne and Sir Joseph, who together had opened the dance, were having a somewhat acrimonious discussion.

"My dear Edith, I'll speak to him if you wish me to," reiterated the baronet for the third time, "but I think it is a little premature."

"I tell you, Joseph, that if you don't speak to him to-morrow, for certain, and ask him what his intentions are towards Leonetta, I shall pack up the girls' and my own traps, and off we'll go."

This brought Sir Joseph to his senses. "Shall we both do it?" he suggested unctuously.

"Very well, if you prefer it. You see I can't ask Lord Henry to speak to him, otherwise I would."

Sir Joseph almost lost his temper. "Lord Henry, Lord Henry!--my dear Edith, of course not! What 'as it got to do with Lord 'Enry?"

"No, that's what I say; that's why I ask you."

"All right, you and I will have him in the study to-morrow, and we'll ask Leonetta up too, and get the whole thing settled."

"But mind!" said the widow gravely, "I am not at all in favour of it."

When at one A.M. on the following morning, "The Fastness" party had been driven home, Leonetta and Vanessa, much too excited to go to bed, lingered interminably over their undressing, and sat talking until nearly daybreak.

Vanessa was feeling very happy on the whole, because she had had more dances with Denis than she had expected. She was therefore quite prepared to be indulgent towards her school-friend, and to exchange notes without bitterness.

"You had a lovely time with Lord Henry, didn't you?" she said. "You are a flirt, Leo!"

"My dear, it was simply heavenly."

"And wasn't Denis wild!" Vanessa exclaimed, hoping to widen the breach between these two.

"Was he?"

"He was wild enough this afternoon, but when he saw you dancing so often with Lord Henry--well!----"

"What did he say this afternoon,--do tell me!"

"He said you were too young to be always talking all sorts of deep things with a man of forty."

Leonetta laughed. "Well, I like that!" she cried. "I wasn't too young last night, was I?"

"Why, what happened last night?" Vanessa enquired, without revealing a trace of envy in her inscrutable Jewish eyes.

"Oh, well, never mind. I suppose I ought to say the night before last.

But, anyhow, Lord Henry is not forty. I asked him. He's only thirty-three."

"Well, I'm only repeating what Denis said," Vanessa observed.

"I know one thing, Lord Henry's jolly clever. Do you know what it is to feel your skin creep all over while anybody's talking to you even about simple subjects?"