“Rum start!” I cried, by way of testing his intellectual quality, but before I could get on terms with him, the stage was taken by a dark, curly-haired, handsome boy of twenty-four or so, generally addressed as “Ronnie.” I had thought him very like a well-intentioned retriever pup. I could imagine him worrying an intellectual slipper to pieces with great gusto.
“I say, it’s all U.P. now,” he said, in a dominating voice. “What’s the time?” He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with evening dress.
Some one said it was “twenty-five to one.”
“Fifty to one against another dance, then,” Ronnie barked joyously.
“Unless you’ll offer yourself up as a martyr in a good cause,” suggested Nora Bailey.
“Offer myself up? How?” Ronnie asked.
“Take ’em home in your car,” Nora said in a penetrating whisper.
“Dead the other way,” was Ronnie’s too patent excuse.
“It’s only a couple of miles through the Park, you know,” Olive Jervaise put in. “You might easily run them over to the vicarage and be back again in twenty minutes.”
“By Jove; yes. So I might,” Ronnie acknowledged. “That is, if I may really come back, Miss Jervaise. Awfully good of you to suggest it. I didn’t bring my man with me, though. I’ll have to go and wind up the old buzz-wagon myself, if your fellow can’t be found. Do you think … could any one…”