"By and by," said Tryon, with his cryptic smile. "I'm waiting for something."
Even as he spoke, Gay saw across the room the face she had been watching for. A tall man had come into the doorway and stood casting a casual but comprehensive eye about him. He was not in evening dress, but wore a loose grey lounge suit of rather careless aspect, and his short, fairish, curly hair was ruffled as though he had been running his fingers through it. Accompanying him was a small black dog with a large stone in its mouth, which came into the ballroom and sat down. Gay gave one look at the pair of them, and the colour went out of her face. There was more than a glint of passion in the eyes she turned to Tyron, who was smiling no longer.
"I'll finish this dance with you, if you like, Dick."
"My shoe hurts," said Tryon.
She flung away from him in a rage and a moment later, was lost among the rest of the dancers in the arms of one Claude Hayes, a man not too proud to take the goods the gods offered, even if they were short ratio. Tryon sauntered over to the doorway tenanted by the man in grey, who appeared to be delightfully impervious to the fact that he was the only person on the scene not in evening dress.
"Hello, Tryon!" said he.
"Hello, Lundi! Thought you meant to turn up and dance tonight?"
"Yes, so I did," said Lundi Druro, looking at Tryon with the blithe and friendly smile that made all men like him. "But I forgot."
"I won't ask what you were doing, then," was Tryon's dry comment. To which Druro responded nothing. He was one of those who did before the sun and moon that which seemed good unto him to do, with a sublime indifference to comments. Everyone knew what he was doing when he "forgot," and he didn't care if they did.
"Lundi meant to get married, but he forgot," was a household jest in Rhodesia, founded on a legend from home that, at a certain supper-party, a beautiful actress had inveigled him into making her an offer of marriage, and the ceremony had been fixed for the following day. But, though bride and wedding-party turned up at the appointed hour, the bridegroom never materialized. He had gone straight from the supper-party at the Savoy to the Green Room Club and fallen into a game of poker that lasted throughout the night and all the next day, with the result that all memory of the proposed wedding had faded from his mind. The lady, very much injured in her tenderest feeling (professional and personal vanity), had sued him for a large sum of money, which he had paid without blinking and returned to South Africa, heart-free, to make some more.