Loree plunged once more into the gay pool of melody and movement. With a little champagne in her head, and her heels as light as air, she managed to throw off the memory of the disagreeable incident that had ruffled the pleasant surface of the evening... but at the back of her mind fright was lurking still, and every now and then it would clutch at her heart with an icy hand that almost stilled its beating. Then, shivering, she would wonder what was taking place in Quelch’s sitting-room and why he and Mrs Solano did not reappear.
Time went on. It had been somewhere about half past midnight when they went away, and at two o’clock there was still no sign of them. Mrs Temple was thankful for the distraction offered by the company of a delightful man of about forty-five whom young Dalkeith had introduced. He was a late-comer having arrived only in time for the ball, and at once with unerring instinct made a bee line for the prettiest woman in the room. His tongue had a witty twist and his eye under a black-ribboned eye-glass was blue and merry as a boy’s. He seemed not to have a care in the world and kept Loree so amused that she almost forgot all cares of her own. Moreover his step suited hers to perfection and while she was dancing with him she thought of nothing. Her mind was a blank except for the delicious feeling of bliss in rhythmical movement.
She was resting after a dance with this man whose name she did not know when one of the hotel servants came up and addressed him in a low voice.
“Mr Quelch would like to speak to you, Sir, in his private sitting-room.”
A shade of annoyance crossed the face of Mrs Temple’s companion.
“Very well,” he answered brusquely, then turned to her, “I wish people would not want to talk business out of business hours!” he remarked with a tinge of impatience. “However, I shall be back in ten minutes or so, Mrs Temple. You won’t give the ninth waltz to any one else, will you? And please don’t forget that I am to have that ‘third extra,’ if there is one. It’s a promise, isn’t it?”
“Very well, we’ll look upon it as a promise,” she smiled. But when the ninth waltz started he had not returned to claim it, and she did not know with whom to be most vexed—Quelch, or her missing partner. Beautiful Loree was not accustomed to bloom unsought in the rôle of wall-flower, and even though she was soon descried and besieged for the remainder of the waltz her vanity was hurt by the incident. She put a small rod in pickle for the defaulting partner when he should turn up, and the promise of the ‘third extra’ was promptly bestowed elsewhere. But the dance went gaily on and the recalcitrant one did not return to receive his punishment. She thought it very strange of him. Also her vexation with Heseltine Quelch increased. Surely if the latter had finished his interview with Mrs Solano he ought at least to come back to report and return the necklace, instead of sending for a business acquaintance and launching into some other affair... incidentally robbing her of the best dancing partner she had ever had! It really was too tiresome of him. She resolved to treat him pretty coolly for his sins.
But up to the last note of the last “extra” there was no sign of him, and unease began, once more, to creep into her mind. What had happened? She was standing near the verandah door when the final bar of God Save the King crashed out. In the second of silence that followed a sharp report was heard from the garden—a strange, unusual sound that made women jump and men run hurriedly through the doors. The garden was dimly luminant with the promise of was that men discovered out there among dawn, yet not light enough to show what it the roses. One or two women devoured by curiosity began to push forward, but returning men barred the way. There were murmurs of an accident. People with good eyesight imagined they saw a slow procession moving through the grounds. Suddenly Quelch appearing from the gloom of trees and shrubs walked into the brightly-lit verandah. Loree forgot her grievances against him and ran to meet him.
“What has happened? Do tell me, Mr Quelch. I feel so frightened.”