Take from Peter what you please, gentlemen all! not for your sakes, believe me that. For Peter’s sake; for the glorification of her talents, and for the fun of it, and because you may take from Peter what you please, so it be not Peter. And she is safe enough, dodging mischievously from one disguise to another, rather wishing—through all the breathless shift and stir and glimmer—to meet for once her equal in skill and tactics. But it will come with the twenty-third waltz of the evening, promised to Antlers-and-Hothouse-Grapes; she has staged her climax cunningly, to crown the end of masquerade.
Supper with Mark St. Quentin, who had two years previously sent her a dozen handkerchiefs, in lieu of the gory one, tenderly retained; thus making for the ministering angel a clear profit of seventeen handkerchiefs, reckoning Merle’s half-dozen. He has spent this evening in being to Peter the cement which knits loose bricks together; watching her hungrily when she slides away in the embrace of another; slipping into the gap when a partner chances to be late; taking the first dance and the last dance and the supper-dance, and any extras she cares to give, and all the numbers she wishes to cut. Quite pleasant, the consciousness of Mark St. Quentin to fill with his stolid and persistent personality the tiniest chink and crevice which the intoxicating hours might otherwise have left empty. Nor is it difficult to supply him with the goods he wants: a solicitous reference to the episode of the thumb, and Peter is established as fragrant sweet-natured woman, thank Heaven, still surviving in a century of Suffragettes and kleptomaniacs—“And druggists,” adds Mark St. Quentin; “Morphia, you know.”
After-supper hours, bringing with them the usual flushed dishevelment, actual and spiritual. Blooms beginning to droop in the heat; prevailing carelessness as to the hieroglyphics actually scrawled on the programme; bold voices, mingling with the bandsmen’s deeper notes, as they chorus to the popular encore, imperiously demanded. Lingerings on the stairs, and where softly-lit seclusion is provided for those who care to linger. Departure of the suave and elderly diplomats; Madame des Essarts must perforce wait, royalty unattended, till romping insatiable youth shall have drunk its fill. Her reflections on modern dancing, its antics and exaggerations, are such as to preclude description. She is pleased to note, however, that her granddaughter’s burnished dark head is still unruffled, her complexion unheated. “Elle est vraie des Essarts!”
Number twenty-one. Merle and Peter, skilfully guided where the throng is thickest, smile at one another in passing, eager, in the midst of enjoyment, for the mutual retrospection of the morrow. Comes the interval between twenty-two and twenty-three. Armand Drélincourt, for the third time in four hours, discourses with immense relish upon his fatal temperament. Peter listens attentively, but springs to her feet, interrupting the narrative at its most thrilling point, when the far-off tinkle of a bell reaches her ear: “Hadn’t we better go down?” Having settled on Logan Thane as a piratical playmate, she is frankly excited at the prospect of number twenty-three.
He is not waiting near the door of the ballroom. Neither is he in the stream descending the stairs. Peter waits impatiently till he shall choose to end his flirtation behind some draped portière. Already the dancers are in full swing. Rose-Marie approaches: “Shall we go home now, Peter? Most people have left; it looks so bad to be among the last.” And behold St. Quentin standing faithful as the painted sentinel of Herculaneum: “May I have the pleasure, Miss Kyndersley?”
“I’m booked already,—where is Logan Thane?”
“But your partner seems to have deserted you. Silly fellow; he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
Peter privately agrees. It takes still three minutes to convince her that Logan Thane has undoubtedly cut his dances and gone home early; and then she lets St. Quentin reap the reward of his tireless vigil: “I shall be leaving after this one, so we may as well finish it instead of the next.” She has flushed richly and her eyes are dark with annoyance. Childishly, she wants Logan Thane to have a sense of all that might have been his, had he not succumbed to weariness.
“Peter,” Rose-Marie’s voice, plaintive now; “the car has been waiting over an hour already, and mother said——”
“All right.” Peter disengages herself from the infatuated St. Quentin, murmurs her thanks to her hostess, looks around in vain for Merle, and suffers herself to be led by Rose-Marie to the cloak-room.