"How kind!" she exclaimed. "But he's far too lifty to know me now, even if I was in the habit——"
"Then I shall never know whether you're still afraid of him," I said. "He'll not come till he's sent for—sent for and told he's wanted——"
"Is this a message?" she demanded.
"A reminder," I answered. "Forgive me, but you have not been discussed by us since he came back from the Continent a year ago. I am recalling something I think he told you over at Lake House before he went to Mexico."
"Oh, the Butterfly Life Sermon? He gave me five years to outgrow it, didn't he? Tell him—No." The first bars of a waltz were starting, and the two ball-rooms began to fill. A corpulent, red young man—I knew him by sight as young Webster—walked sheepishly to our window and stood in front of us. Sonia looked round the crowded room with eager, bright eyes, pulled the straps of her dress higher on to the shoulders and rose to her feet. "I'll leave you to make up the message," she told me; and to her partner, "Come Fatty. Let's take the floor before the mob gets in."
In the still empty room they executed a wonderful stage-dance of dips and runs and eccentric twinings. As O'Rane joined me by the open window, I felt there was no need to give him any message.
"Supper or bed?" I asked him as I glanced at my watch.
"Not bed!" he answered, with a touch of the old exultant joy in existence that I had not seen since his early days at Oxford. "I'm having the time of my life, George. I'm dam' good at this sort of thing. First of all I danced with Amy Loring and didn't tear her dress. Then I found a Conservative Whip——"
"Are you really standing?"
"Don't interrupt! I invited Lady Dainton to have supper twice, and she accepted both times. I asked perfect strangers to dance with me on the ground that I'd met their brothers in Hong-Kong. I cadged cigarettes from other perfect strangers, and I carried out a First Secretary's wife in a fainting condition."