The friend’s eyes twinkled greedily.
“I’ll swap that bat,” said Michael, “if you’ll make sure my kiddy sister hasn’t got a single empty place on her programme all the dance.”
“All right,” said the friend. And as he was led up to Stella, Michael whispered hurriedly, when the introduction had been decorously made:
“This chap’s frightfully keen on you, Stella. He simply begged me to introduce him to you.”
Then from the depths of Michael’s soul a deep-seated cunning inspired him to add:
“I wouldn’t at first, because he was awfully in love with another girl and I thought it hard cheese on her, because she’s here to-night. But he said he’d go home if he didn’t dance with you. So I had to.”
Michael looked enquiringly at Stella, marked the smirk of satisfaction on her lips, then recklessly, almost sliding over the polished floor, he plunged through Muriel’s suitors and proffered his programme. They danced together nearly all the evening, and alas, Muriel told him that she was going to boarding-school next term. It was a blow to Michael, and the dance programme with Muriel’s name fourteen times repeated was many times looked at with sentimental pangs each night of next term before Michael went to bed a hundred miles away from Muriel at her boarding-school.
However, Muriel and her porcelain-blue eyes and the full bow of her lips and the slimness and girlishness of her were forgotten in the complexities of life at a great public school. Michael often looked back to that first term in the Lower Third as a period of Arcadian simplicity, a golden age. In his second term Michael after an inconspicuous position in the honest heart of the list was not moved up, for which he was very glad, as the man who took the Upper Third was by reputation a dull driver without any of the amenities by which Foxy Braxted seasoned scholastic life.
One morning, when the Lower Third had been pleasantly dissolved in laughter by Foxy’s caustic jokes at the expense of a boy who had pronounced the Hebrides as a dissyllable, following a hazardous guess that the capital of New South Wales was New York, the door of the class-room opened abruptly and Dr. Brownjohn the Headmaster sailed in.
“Is there a boy called Fane in this class?” he demanded deeply.