"Perhaps it will; though I'm bound to admit that it doesn't look that way at present. Now, if Jef—"
From what has gone before it will be understood that any mention of Jeffard for good or ill was the one thing which Bartrow had promised himself to avoid at all hazards; wherefore he broke the name in the midst, coughed, dragged out his watch,—in short, did what manlike untactfulness may do to create a diversion, and at the end of it found the unafraid eyes fixed upon him with mandatory orders in them.
"Go on," she said calmly. "If Mr. Jeffard"—
"Really, Connie, I must break it off short; my time's up. Don't you hear the orchestra? Miss Van Vetter will"—
But Connie was not to be turned aside by any consideration for Bartrow's engagements or her own; nor yet by the inflow into the alcove-conservatory of sundry other fanning couples lately freed from the hop-and-slide of the two-step. Nor yet again by the appearance of young Mr. Theodore Calmaine, who came up behind Bartrow and was straightway transfixed and driven forth with pantomimic cut and thrust.
"Myra will have no difficulty in finding a partner. Don't be foolish, Dick. I have known all along that you have learned something about Mr. Jeffard which you wouldn't tell me. You may remember that you have persistently ignored my questions in your answers to my letters,—and I paid you back by telling you little or nothing about Myra. Now what were you going to say?"
"I was going to say that if Jeffard were like what he used to be, he would do for Lansdale what I shall probably not be able to do."
"What do you know about Mr. Jeffard?"
"What all the world knows—and a little more. Of course you have read what the newspapers had to say?"