"Come, we must go back to the ballroom," says she gaily. "We have been here an unconscionable time. I am afraid my partner for this dance has been looking for me, and will scarcely forgive my treating him so badly. If I had only told him I wouldn't dance with him he might have got another partner and enjoyed himself."
"Better to have loved and lost," quotes Beauclerk in his airiest manner. It is so airy that it strikes Joyce unpleasantly. Surely after all—after——She pulls herself together angrily. Is she always to find fault with him? Must she have his whole nature altered to suit her taste?
"Ah, there is Dicky Browne," says she, glancing from where she is now standing at the door of the conservatory to where Mr. Browne may be seen leaning against a curtain with his lips curved in a truly benevolent smile.
CHAPTER XIII.
"Now the nights are all past over Of our dreaming, dreams that hover In a mist of fair false things: Night's afloat on wide wan wings."
"Why, so it is! Our own Dicky, in the flesh and an admirable temper apparently," says Mr. Beauclerk. "Shall we come and interview him?"
They move forward and presently find themselves at Mr. Browne's elbow; he is, however, so far lost in his kindly ridicule of the poor silly revolving atoms before him, that it is not until Miss Kavanagh gives his arm a highly suggestive pinch that he learns that she is beside him.
"Wough!" says he, shouting out this unclassic if highly expressive word without the slightest regard for decency. "What fingers you've got! I really think you might reserve that kind of thing for Mr. Dysart. He'd like it."