“We’ll have a look round, if you like,” said the genial stranger, “when we’ve finished our smoke, that is. Have a drink too; may cool us a bit. Know many people here?”
“Not a soul,” replied Bailey. “My hostess doesn’t seem to have turned up.”
“Well, that’s easily remedied,” said the stranger. “My daughter’s one of the spinsters—Granby, my name; when we’ve had a drink, I’ll make her find you a partner—that is, if you care for the light fantastic.”
“I should like a dance or two,” said Bailey, “though I’m getting a bit past it now, I suppose. Still, it doesn’t do to chuck up the sponge prematurely.”
“Certainly not,” Granby agreed jovially; “a man’s as young as he feels. Well, come and have a drink and then we’ll hunt up my little girl.” The two men flung away the stumps of their cigarettes and headed for the refreshments.
The spinsters’ champagne was light, but it was well enough if taken in sufficient quantity; a point to which Augustus—and Granby too—paid judicious attention; and when he had supplemented the wine with a few sandwiches, Mr. Bailey felt in notably better spirits. For, to tell the truth, his diet, of late, had been somewhat meagre. Miss Granby, when found, proved to be a blonde and guileless “flapper” of some seventeen summers, childishly eager to play her part of hostess with due dignity; and presently Bailey found himself gyrating through the eddying crowd in company with a comely matron of thirty or thereabouts.
The sensations that this novel experience aroused rather took him by surprise. For years past he had been living a precarious life of mean and sordid shifts that oscillated between mere shabby trickery and downright crime; now conducting a paltry swindle just inside the pale of the law, and now, when hard pressed, descending to actual theft; consorting with shady characters, swindlers and knaves and scurvy rogues like himself; gambling, borrowing, cadging and, if need be, stealing, and always slinking abroad with an apprehensive eye upon “the man in blue.”
And now, amidst the half-forgotten surroundings, once so familiar; the gaily-decorated rooms, the rhythmic music, the twinkle of jewels, the murmur of gliding feet and the rustle of costly gowns, the moving vision of honest gentlemen and fair ladies; the shameful years seemed to drop away and leave him to take up the thread of his life where it had snapped so disastrously. After all, these were his own people. The seedy knaves in whose steps he had walked of late were but aliens met by the way.
He surrendered his partner, in due course, with regret—which was mutual—to an inarticulate subaltern, and was meditating another pilgrimage to the refreshment-room, when he felt a light touch upon his arm. He turned swiftly. A touch on the arm meant more to him than to some men. But it was no wooden-faced plain-clothes man that he confronted; it was only a lady. In short, it was Mrs. Chater, smiling nervously and a little abashed by her own boldness.
“I expect you’ve forgotten me,” she began apologetically, but Augustus interrupted her with an eager disclaimer.