Captain Utterbourne, with faint petulance, his lips twitching to a smile
of finely etched satire, scrupulously withdrew; but he turned back
a moment and faced King with the most affectionate and least complex
expression of which he was capable.
“By the way, would you mind dropping in at my office tomorrow? You know
where we are—Hyde’s. There’s something I’d like to go into—h’m?” His mere
look subtly completed the sentence; for Captain Utterbourne had perfected
the art of intelligible suspension. Mr. King agreed eagerly, though he
kept his monocle spinning in a thoroughly sophisticated and idle fashion.
Utterbourne had been but glancingly arrested in his departure—all this
was very high art. With a faint bow to Stella, which delicately rebuked
her for having been the means of interrupting him at a moment when he had
cryptically begun to open his mind to his new favourite, the Captain was
gone; and they saw him pause, in passing, to banter his sister Flora,
just glancingly, as she sat in a little whirl of gentle gossip near the
punch bowl.
“May I sit down here?” suggested Mr. King gracefully; and found her
looking up at him almost coyly, as though having tête-à-têtes with men of
his calibre were indeed an established phase of her life. But naturally
her heart was fluttering very much.
He talked easily and in a conventionally flirtatious manner: had been
noticing her all evening, he said—though as a matter of fact, he was but
recently arrived. And she, almost painfully excited, played back in quite
the same spirit, though it privately cost a greater effort. Mr. King was
so bewilderingly nice that she used every instinctive gift in an effort
to please and impress him: yes, just giddily let herself go.
They talked of pleasant immediacies. When she dropped her
handkerchief, he stooped to pick it up; and when he handed it to her
something—something vaguely reminiscent—made her feel as she had felt
when the introduction was taking place. Certainly no one had ever before
treated her with such a wealth of worldly chivalry.
“Oh, thank you!” she fluttered; and he returned a deft little gesture.
Then another flash of reminiscence brought a gay cry to her lips. “Oh,
now I know! We’ve met before—though I’m _sure_ you’ll never remember!”
And as she spoke of the episode of the rescued fashion page, Stella saw
again a handsome stranger emerging from the travel bureau, his hand full
of alluring pamphlets, and in his buttonhole a single violet. Surely she
hadn’t been mistaken?
Just at first he didn’t seem to remember, but in an instant he
chivalrously remembered it all with the utmost vividness. They discussed
the curious little coincidence. It was quite wonderful. Her romantic
nature made the lavish most of a circumstance which to another might seem
casual in the extreme. Such things really happen pretty often, but her
mood insisted upon the most rosy values; and indeed, the tiny episode,
from the moment he did remember, seemed to carry them swiftly along
toward an intimacy undreamed of a moment since.
He looked at her, she felt, almost consumingly with his magnetic round
blue eyes.
Presently he asked whether she wouldn’t like some punch, and she said
she would, so they got up and he gave her his worldly arm. She had never
before been so satisfyingly thrilled.
Mr. King handed her a glass of punch, making a minute ceremony of it; and
she fluttered again, and smiled across at him quite archly over the rim
as she sipped.
He asked her: “I suppose you spend about all your time dancing, Miss
Meade? It seems to be the rage nowadays.”
And while she ought, of course, to have laughed it off, or been at
least flirtingly evasive, she looked at him instead with an impulse of
wistfulness out of her meagre life, and a wave of unassuming candour
brought out the admission: “I really don’t very much, but I enjoy it
immensely. Don’t you think this is a very nice party?”
He seemed to regard her with subtly keener interest; and, curiously
enough, it was just that impulsive little flash of candour in Stella, to
begin with, that stimulated in Mr. King a sentiment destined at last to
involve her most surprisingly. She had a very definite picture, however,
of the sort of impression she wanted to make on this man—the impression
he seemed irresistibly to invite—and it would have bewildered her to
think he might be getting another picture altogether.
He asked her if she wouldn’t like to dance, and without even glancing at
her card she said yes she would; and then half wished she had said no,
because she was hazy about the new steps, and was desperately afraid Mr.
King would find her, after all, disappointing.
But they danced, and everything went splendidly, and he didn’t find her
so disappointing, although himself so immaculately proficient in the new
steps.