'Better employed perhaps—ha! ha!'
At the same moment Peggy feels a convulsive pressure on her arm, and hears Prue's passionately excited voice:
'There he is! at the far end of the room; he is looking for us! Oh, how can we make him see us?'
She has raised herself on tiptoe, and is sending a look of such agonised entreaty down the hall as, one would think, must penetrate even the mass of shifting, buzzing humanity that intervenes between her and its object. Perhaps it does. Perhaps the magnet that Freddy once prettily suggested to be in the hearts of all good people drawing them together is exercising its influence on his. At all events, in a few minutes they see him smilingly pushing his way, stopped at every step by greetings and compliments—for it has somehow become generally diffused through the room that to him is to be ascribed most of the glory of the entertainment—through the crowd. In a moment more he is before them.
'Here you are, you dear things!' he says, taking a hand of each, looking flushed and handsome, and speaking in an excited voice. 'Did not it go off wonderfully well?—not a hitch anywhere. Did you hear the prompter once? No? Neither of you? I thought not; and yet if you had seen us half an hour before the curtain drew up, you would have said that the whole thing was going to be a fiasco.'
He stops to draw a long breath of self-congratulation.
'I kept the chair beside me as long as I could,' says Prue, in a faltering voice; 'I did my best.'
His eye rests on her for a moment with a puzzled air—on her small face, flushed like his own; but, alas! how differently! It is evident that for the first second he does not comprehend her, having entirely forgotten his own request. Then recollecting:
'How good of you, dear!' he says affectionately. 'Of course, it was a bitter disappointment to me, too; but on occasions of this kind,' with a slight resigned shrug, 'one must, of course, give up all idea of individual enjoyment.'
He is such an embodiment of radiant joy as he speaks, that Margaret cannot help darting an indignant look at him—a bolt aimed so full and true, that it hits him right in his laughing eyes.