“Isn’t it time we moved?” she asked. “I see Falstaff’s gone away, so you can’t turn him into a white rabbit now; and there doesn’t seem to be anything else you could enchant just at present. The orchestra will be starting in a moment, anyhow.”
She rose as she spoke. Sir Clinton followed her example, and they made their way out of the winter-garden.
“What costume is Michael Clifton wearing to-night?” asked Sir Clinton as the orchestra played the opening bars of the dance. “I ought to congratulate him; and it’s easier to pick him up at a distance if I know how he’s dressed.”
“Look for something in eighteenth-century clothes and a large wig, then,” Joan directed. “He says he’s Macheath out of the ‘Beggar’s Opera.’ I suppose he’s quite as like that as anything else. You’ll perhaps recognize him best by a large artificial mole at the left corner of his mouth. I observed it particularly myself.”
She noticed that her partner seemed more on the alert than the occasion required.
“What are you worried about?” she demanded. “You seem to be listening for something; and you can’t hear anything, you know, even if you tried, because of the orchestra.”
Sir Clinton shook off his air of preoccupation.
“The fact is, Joan, I’ve been worried all evening. I’m really afraid of something happening to-night. I don’t much like this mask business with all that stuff in the collections. I’ve a feeling in my bones that there might be trouble.”
Joan laughed at his gloomy premonitions.
“You won’t be kept on the rack much longer, that’s one good thing. There’s just this dance, then the march-past for judging the costumes, and then it will be midnight when everybody must unmask. So you’ll have to make the best of your fears in the next half-hour. After that there’ll be no excuse for them.”