“I met her once. What’s the odds?”
They moved out on the floor. Mark Steele passed them with the schoolma’am clasped in his manly arms. The school-teacher was very good-looking, a vivacious person with a mass of dark auburn hair and gray eyes and Mark was supposed to like her rather well. He smiled and spoke to Ivy over his partner’s shoulder and Ivy bestowed on Mark her sweetest smile and a pert reply.
Robin looked down at her. Her dark head didn’t come more than halfway up his breast, so he couldn’t see her eyes. But he felt a strange stiffness in her attitude, a resentment. Robin had a faculty of gauging Ivy’s moods without a word from her. Almost at once the anticipated pleasure of the evening began to wane. Ivy was sore because he knew May Sutherland well enough to speak to her. She would go out of her way to make him feel her displeasure. She would want to hurt him, and she would be extremely nice to Mark Steele, or some other man, just to spite him. More than likely she would choose to use Steele as a foil. With what Robin knew of Mark’s raiding Mayne’s stock and Mark’s attitude toward himself Robin foresaw some unpleasant moments ahead. For a fleeting instant he wished he hadn’t come. Then he felt ashamed of himself for such a weakness, annoyed at anticipation of trouble and a wish to avoid it. Time enough to worry when trouble lifted its ugly head.
“Floor’s good,” he remarked to Ivy. “I feel like I had wings on.”
“Yes,” she drawled with a rising inflection. “Look out you don’t fly too high.”
“Wha’s a molla, hon?” he wheedled. “You’re not goin’ to have a grouch about nothin’, are you?”
Ivy looked up at him. It happened that at that precise instant Robin’s gaze was on May and her partner. Ivy’s dark eyes glowed.
“I will if you dance with that stuck-up thing,” she whispered tensely. “Promise me you won’t.”
“Ivy,” he protested. “What the dickens has got into you all at once?”
“She thinks she’s so darned smart,” Ivy muttered.