I hurried through the introductions, inspected the table in the dining-room and sought that corner of Loring's bedroom to which I had been banished for the following three nights. There was a wonderful to-do with opening and shutting doors, whisperings and exhortations, lendings and borrowings, all conducted through the medium of Lady Loring's ubiquitous maid. The hour of dinner was reached before the party began to assemble, and long past before the last laggard had appeared. Lady Loring, white-haired, plump and unruffled, caught me glancing at my watch and took me aside.
"George, my dear, forgive an old busybody and tell me who is to take little Miss Dainton in." I consulted my list and found that the honour fell to Summertown. "The poor child's so nervous she daren't come down; Amy's trying to comfort her. First ball, you know. Thinks she looks a fright, you know. If you can give her a little confidence ..."
"I'll send O'Rane in with her," I said. "They've known each other for years."
I called him up and was explaining the new arrangement of places when the door opened, and Sonia came in—white from her little satin slippers to the band of silk ribbon round her hair. For all her maturing figure she scarce looked her boasted sixteen years: the oval Madonna face and beseeching brown eyes were still those of a child. When last I saw her, twelve years later, there was hardly an appreciable change in her appearance. "George, my dear, she looks like a baby angel," whispered Lady Loring, as I gave her my arm. The rest of the party sorted itself into pairs and followed us. "Bambina, you're divine!" I heard Raney saying, by way of inspiring confidence. Unlike the majority of such remarks, this one was free of exaggeration.
As a rule one ball is very much like another, though on this occasion there were one or two differences. As a steward I displayed much fruitless activity, and covered miles in search of some heartless A who had told a tearful Miss B to meet him "just inside the door," where traffic was most congested. Anxious friends gripped my arm with an,—"I say, old man, I'm one short. D'you feel like doing the Good Samaritan touch? She's a friend of my sister's, goes over at the knee a bit, but otherwise all right. I don't want to be stuck with her the whole night." Dowagers petitioned me to have the windows shut, or confided the disappearance of a brooch. "So long, with sapphires here and here, and the pin a little bent. I've had it for years and wouldn't lose it for anything."
At the end of half an hour I retired to Summertown's rooms in Canterbury and changed my first collar. It was unnecessary, but I wished to present an appearance of strenuousness. The music of the lancers began as I entered Tom Quad, and pairs of figures, garish or sombre in the evening light, hastened their leisurely pace along the broad terrace. Sonia met me by appointment at the door of the cathedral, and I was reluctantly compelled to pilot her to O'Rane's garret in Peck.
"I just wanted to see it," she told me, as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the most Spartan room in Oxford. Two wicker chairs, a table without a cloth, a rickety sideboard and a bookcase with three Reading Room books were all the furniture; there were no ornaments, no pictures, and only one photograph—a signed snapshot of Sonia paddling a canoe on the river at Crowley Court.
"It was very tactful of him to put the photograph out," I said.
"Doesn't he always ...?" Sonia began, and then blushed.