Here Gunning rushed up. "He has caved in at last! He has consented to dance with her—but only after a regular battle. It was that funny to watch 'em. Their goings on together were like a play, they were, but she has got round him. I say, Miss Ballinger, I want to know if you and your brother won't come out to Tuxedo on Saturday and stay till Monday, as my guests. It's an awfully jolly place, and I'll get up a nice party—just the right set, you know—no outsiders—if you'll come."
"You are very good; but it is impossible. We are engaged."
"What? both days? Couldn't you come for one?"
"No. I, at least, am engaged both days. I can't answer for my brother."
And so, after the little dramatic dance of coquetry and pursuit and capture between the Spanish husband and wife was gone through, the evening came to an end.
CHAPTER VIII
The next morning Grace sat turning over the leaves of a book which had just been sent her. The elderly author had been presented to her the evening before, and had promptly sent her his "Souvenirs," which were said to be having a great sale, especially in the Far West, where its axioms of etiquette and records of high life in New York were accepted with unquestioning reverence. A smile played on the girl's face, culminating now and again in a burst of merriment as her eye fell on such passages as these:
"It is well to be in with the nobs, who are born to their position; but the support of the swells is more advantageous, for society is sustained and carried on by the swells!"
Grace fairly screamed when she read of some man who was supposed to have been in fashionable English life, that "He was in with all the sporting world—intimate with the champion prize-fighter, the Queen's pages, Tattersall's, and others!"
She had just come to this passage when there was a knock at her door, and in response to her "Come!" (in America the invitation is confined to that monosyllable), Mr. Ferrars was announced.