"I believe I shall end in converting you, after all! Number twelve.
Don't forget."
And turning from him she saw that her husband stood a few paces off, watching them with a thoughtful scrutiny that caught at her heart. Gliding across the polished floor, she slipped a hand under his elbow, and leaned close to him.
"Darling," she whispered, "I am so glad this is ours." Without a word, he put his arm round her, and swept her into the crowd.
For a while Lenox followed them with his eyes, as they circled smoothly in and out among the dancers, as notable a couple as the room contained. Then he raked the shifting crowd for Quita's grey-green figure,—in vain. Neither she nor Garth was to be seen. It needed small perspicacity to locate them: and grinding his teeth Lenox went out again into a night jewelled with the unnumbered bonfires of the universe. Striking a match, he lit his pipe, in defiance of the knowledge that for the past few weeks he had been persistently overstepping his self-imposed allowance, and fell to pacing the railed path outside the building.
Was it altogether his own fault, he wondered bitterly, that he stood thus, cut off from the core of life, breaking his teeth upon the husks of it, and making believe that they satisfied his hunger? In the tragedies resulting from 'the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things,' that question flung, again and again into the 'derisive silence of eternity,' mocks the soul with echo's answer. Where lies the blame? Where, indeed? For all his vaunted supremacy man is not always master of his fate. Circumstance, heredity, the despicable trifle, the inexpert finger, which a certain type of human is so zealous to thrust into an alien life, compass him about with a cloud of witnesses to his own impotence.
With which conclusion, softened by the kindly influence of drugged tobacco, Lenox knocked the ashes out of his pipe; and decided that since he was here to observe his wife and Garth, and to cure himself of an undignified infatuation, it would be well to return to the ballroom till number twelve.
But as he moved forward a low laugh, near at hand, chained him to the spot. Then Quita emerged from a patch of shadow, closely followed by Garth. She tilted her chin, and flung a smiling threat at him over her shoulder.
"If you can't be more reasonable, I shall cancel your remaining dances and give them to the Riley boy." Which announcement brought him swiftly to her side; and Lenox failed to catch his murmured reply. They passed on without perceiving him; and he followed . . . merely from a sense of duty!
At one of the open doorways, that flung panels of light across the verandah, they paused; and he paused also, a few paces off. The couples within were forming themselves into ordered squares.
"Lancers," she said, in a tone of distaste.