The room was a blaze of light. The decorations miraculously had all been arranged. And down the center, under its canopy of snowy linen, with the silver gleaming and sparkling, ran the long table. Place cards? Yes, here they were. And amid much laughter the various couples found their places.
Then silence, while Mr. Hampton at the head of the table, looking impressive and yet mischievous, lifted his glass—of sparkling grape juice.
“Friends,” he said, “under other circumstances, the announcement I am about to make would come in an utterly different way. But the people involved—oh, yes, there are people involved—lead such scatterbrain lives that the customary manner of announcing engagements must be a bit scatterbrained, too.”
Bob and Frank, standing beside their partners across the table from Jack, looked pointedly at him and Rafaela, grinning widely the while. And in the little pause following Mr. Hampton’s last words, the aviators who had been unaware of what was coming and felt sadly puzzled, caught the significance of that glance. Jack tried to grin back manfully, but it was what his two comrades privately considered a sickly attempt. As for Rafaela, she looked as demure and unconcerned as if not she, but some other of the beautiful girls nodding to her with parted lips, was about to be named.
“I ask you to drink,” cried Mr. Hampton, “to my son and his affianced bride.”
There, the secret was a secret no longer. And in the hubbub that followed, with girls crowding around Rafaela, and the men about Jack, telling him what a lucky fellow he was, the dinner bade fair to be forgotten.
But suddenly a waiter wearing an anxious frown appeared at Mr. Hampton’s elbow, apologetically but firmly pleading for a hearing.
“It’s that crazy fella you says must be master of ceremonies,” he said. “He says you must go on with the dinner or it will be spoiled. He’s out there in the kitchen, tearin’ around like wild. I says no good would come of havin’ one o’ these Spanish chefs in the kitchen, bossin’ everybody. There,” pointing toward the kitchen door—“there he is now.”
Mr. Hampton, lips quirked in a smile, let his gaze travel down the room. In the kitchen door, outlined against the gleaming ranges beyond, stood a figure, arms akimbo. Mr. Hampton said to the waiter, “All right, tell him to begin.” And to the distant figure, he waved a hand, a signal which the latter apparently understood, for he disappeared.
“Ramon says we must begin dinner,” Mr. Hampton announced, turning to Don Ferdinand on his right. And he rapped on the table, and made a similar announcement. “You’ll all have to sit down and be good,” he added, “or the old fellow’s heart will be broken. He wouldn’t let anybody, not even the caterer, oversee this dinner but himself. Says he owes it to Jack for lifting from him a load that oppressed him for years.”