“Try the field glasses,” replied Gethryn, giving them to her again, at the same time opening her big plumy fan and waving it to and fro beside the flushed cheek.
Presently she cried out, “Oh, look! There is Mr Elliott and Mr Rowden, and I think Mr Clifford—but I hope not.”
He leaned forward and swept the floor with the field glass.
“It’s Clifford, sure enough,” he muttered; “what on earth induces him to dance in that set?”
It was Clifford.
At that moment he was addressing Elliott in pleading, though hazy, phrases.
“Come ’long, Elliott, don’t be so—so uncomf’t’ble ’n’ p’tic’lar! W’t’s use of be’ng shnobbish?” he urged, clinging hilariously to his partner, a pigeon-toed ballet girl. But Elliott only laughed and said:
“No; waltzes are all I care for. No quadrille for me—”
The crash of the orchestra drowned his voice, and Clifford, turning and bowing gravely to his partner, and then to his vis-à-vis, began to perform such antics and cut such pigeonwings that his pigeon-toed partner glared at him through the slits of her mask in envious astonishment. The door was dotted with numerous circles of maskers, ten or fifteen deep, all watching and applauding the capers of the hilarious couples in the middle.
But Clifford’s set soon attracted a large and enthusiastic audience, who were connoisseurs enough to distinguish a voluntary dancer from a hired one; and when the last thundering chords of Offenbach’s “March into Hell” scattered the throng into a delirious waltz, Clifford reeled heavily into the side scenes and sat down, rather unexpectedly, in the lap of Mademoiselle Nitouche, who had crept in there with the Baron Silberstein for a nice, quiet view of a genuine cancan.