Louise felt the blood swirling to her head, but she braced herself to stand the volleying of eyes. Her mother was intensely annoyed and made not the least effort to conceal her annoyance. When the incident had been merged in a diversion afforded by a recitation of a Portuguese madrigal in another room by a man with unkempt hair and untidy fingernails, Mrs. Treharne glided away from Louise's side for a moment and found the woman who had proposed the toast. She was still absorbedly busy at the buffet.
"You are to leave at once, Ethel," she said in a low but determined tone to the toast-proposer, a woman whose divorce story in the newspapers had been remarkable for the detailed account of liquid refreshments she had consumed up and down the world, at foreign hotels and on board yachts, for a number of years at a stretch. "I shall never forgive you if you make another scene here."
"All right, Tony," the woman replied, with a vacuous smile. "Not angry at me, are you, for wishing luck to your little girl—your big girl, I mean; she is an empress, you know, and—"
Mrs. Treharne guided her to the cloak room and stayed by her side until she bade her goodnight at the door.
Louise, in the meantime, had been approached by a man whose eyes, she had noticed with a certain vague disquietude, had been following her about since her entrance upon the scene.
He was a handsome man of the florid type, with a sweeping blonde mustache and oddly-restless light brown eyes in which Louise, catching him devouring her with his gaze at frequent intervals, nervously thought that she detected certain felinely-topaz glints. He was tall and a trifle over-heavy; but there was a certain slow-moving, easy air of adventitious distinction about him which might have been in part lent by the immaculateness of his evening clothes and his facile way of disposing of his hands without requiring any article to give them employment; an art in which even practiced courtiers and carpet knights occasionally are deficient. Louise did not like his face; she observed, when she saw, not without a certain vague trepidation, that he was approaching her, that his over-red and over-full lips, from which the sweeping mustache was brushed away, were curved in a sort of habitual sneer which by no stretch of charity could be called a smile; though that, no doubt, was the desired intent of it.
He bowed low, keeping his eyes upraised on Louise's face, when he reached her side, and said:
"Miss Treharne?"
Louise, used to more formal methods of meeting new men, inclined her head.
"You will condone, I hope, Miss Treharne, my seeming breach of formality in presuming to address you without a presentation," he said, even his intensified smile failing to efface the sneering curve from his too visible lips. "But your mother is generous enough to permit her guests at times—on such occasions as these, for example—to forego formality. I have been ineffectually trying to reach her for an hour in order to—"