“Why, my dear,” she exclaimed, “wherever did you vanish to last night? Claude told us all that, in the middle of a dance with him, you excused yourself for a moment and he never saw you again. I quite expected to read in the papers this morning that you had eloped.”
“Precisely what I did,” Lady Cynthia declared. “The only trouble was that my partner had had enough of me before the evening was over, and deposited me once more in Grosvenor Square. It is really very humiliating,” she went on meditatively, “how every one always returns me.”
“You talk such nonsense, Cynthia!” Lady Torrington exclaimed, a little pettishly. “However, you found your way home all right?”
“Quite safely, thank you. I was going to write you a note this afternoon. I went away on an impulse. All I can say is that I am sorry. Do forgive me.”
“Certainly!” was the somewhat chilly reply. “Somehow or other, you seem to have earned the right to do exactly as you choose. Some of my young men whom you had promised to dance with, were disappointed, but after all, I suppose that doesn't matter.”
“Not much,” Lady Cynthia assented sweetly. “I think a few disappointments are good for most of the young men of to-day.”
“What did you do last night, Cynthia?” Margaret asked her presently, when Lady Torrington had passed on.
“I eloped with your father,” Lady Cynthia confessed, smiling across at Sir Timothy. “We went for a little drive together and I had a most amusing time. The only trouble was, as I have been complaining to that tiresome woman, he brought me home again.”
“But where did you go to?” Margaret persisted.
“It was an errand of charity,” Sir Timothy declared.