She turned away and reached up for her hat, which hung on a peg just above her head. "I think I would rather go straight home," she added.
Fanny sprang to her feet and caught at her companion with impulsive hands, dragging her into the centre of the room.
"Nonsense," she said, "you want cheering up far more than I do. Here, gentlemen," she went on, "you perceive a young lady suffering from an attack of the blues. If you will wait two minutes I'll make her face respectable—doesn't do to shock Sevenoaks—and we will all go to supper. Meanwhile let me introduce you—Miss Rutherford, known in the company as Sylvia Leicester, the some dancer of the Brown show."
"If Miss Rutherford does not feel up to supper," Dick suggested—he wanted, if possible, to help the girl out of her difficulty; he realized that she did not want to come—"let us make it another night, or perhaps you could all come to lunch with me to-morrow?"
Again Joan had lifted her eyes and was watching him, but now the defiance was uppermost in her mind. His face, to begin with, had worried her; the faint hint of having seen him somewhere before had been perplexing. She always disliked the way Fanny would welcome the most promiscuous acquaintances in their joint dressing-room at all times. She thought now that it must have been contempt which she had read in this man's eyes, and apart from their attraction—for in an indefinite way they had attracted her—the idea spurred her to instant rebellion.
"No, let's go to supper," she exclaimed; "Fanny is quite right, I do want to be cheered up. Let's eat, drink, and be merry."
She turned rather feverishly and started rubbing the make-up off her face with Fanny's rag. The other girl, meanwhile, slipped behind a curtain which hung across one side of the room and finished her dressing, carrying on an animated conversation with Swetenham all the time.
Dick drew a little closer to Joan. "Why do you come?" he asked. "You know you hate it and us."
Under the vanishing paint the colour flamed to Joan's face and died away-again. "Because I want to," she said; "and as for hating—you are wrong there; I don't hate anything or anyone, except, perhaps, myself." The last words were so low he hardly heard them.
They strolled across to the Grand Hotel; it was Fanny's suggestion that they should not bother with a cab. She walked between the two men, a hand on each of them. Joan walked the further side of Swetenham, and Dick had no chance of seeing her even, but he knew that she was very silent, and, he could gather, depressed. At supper, which they had served in a little private room, and over the champagne, she won back to a certain hilarity of spirit. Swetenham was entirely immersed in amusing and being amused by Fanny, and Joan set herself—Dick fancied it was deliberately—to talk and laugh. It was almost as if she were afraid of any silence that might fall between them. He did not help her very much; he was content to watch her. Absurd as it may seem, he knew himself to be almost happy because she was so near him, because the fancied dream of the last two years had come to sudden reality. The other feelings, the disgust and disappointment which had lain behind their first meeting, were for the time being forgotten. Now and again he met her eyes and felt, from the odd pulse of happiness that leapt in his heart, that his long search was over. So triumphantly does love rise over the obstacles of common sense and worldly knowledge—love, which takes no count of time, degrees, or place.