At first Patsy listened with indifference, her eyes on the other side of the room and her chin in the air. She was so sorry, but she thought that of course Louis had all his arrangements made long before. She had seen him from the time they came in, yet while she was sitting beside his mother, he had never seen fit to come near them!
Whereupon Louis explained. He had been busy—the onerous duties of an attaché—and so forth.
Patsy kept him awhile on the tenterhooks. He went on to remind her of the burn of the Glen-wood. He described their nests in the beech-butt and under the shelter of the great march dyke. He would have spoken of the race across the moors and the rescue at the White Gates, save that by instinct he knew that her thoughts would at once be carried to Stair Garland, the man who was a man and as such had played the leading part on these occasions. He hated even to see the Duke of Lyonesse limp and to think that he had not even done that himself!
"Well, the one after next!" said Patsy carelessly, after consulting the list of dances for those she had marked with her own hieroglyphic.
"Meanwhile, stay here with Lady Lucy till I am ready. I am certainly not going to seek you up and down the ball-room."
This she said because she noticed that the Arlington was beginning to waft signals in the young man's direction with her fan. Therefore, before she took her next partner's arm, she saw Louis sit down beside his delighted mother, and talking to her in a manner so completely absorbed that he never so much as raised his eyes.
Patsy proved perfectly entrancing when it came to be Louis's turn to dance with her, but before the end of the music they dropped out, for Patsy said, "Now we shall climb the bank till we find our nook!"
And taking the young man's hand they ran nimbly up the stairs till they came to a dimly curtained recess which, if the truth must be told, Patsy had just vacated.
"Oh," said Louis, delighted, "you are as clever at finding hidie-holes in Hertford House as you used to be in the brows of the Abbey Water!"
"Draw the curtains closer," said Patsy, "or we shall have your Mrs. Arlington spying us out and carrying you off with a single wave of her fan. She reminds me of Circe—a fat, curly-wurly Circe—like that picture Uncle Ju brought back from Italy. Why do you run after her, Louis? I told you to go and make love to as many pretty girls as would let you, and here you go and break the tables of affinity by making love to your grandmother!"