The hero of the fête, with the dark-eyed little beauty upon his arm, reached the top of the second flight of stairs; and here, beyond a spacious landing, where two proud-like darkies tended a crystalline punch bowl, four wide archways in a rose-vine lattice framed gliding silhouettes of waltzers, already smoothly at it to the castanets of “_La Paloma_.” Old John Minafer, evidently surfeited, was in the act of leaving these delights. “D’want ’ny more o’ that!” he barked. “Just slidin’ around! Call that dancin’? Rather see a jig any day in the world! They ain’t very modest, some of ’em. I don’t mind _that_, though. Not me!”
Miss Fanny Minafer was no longer in charge of him: he emerged from the ballroom escorted by a middle-aged man of commonplace appearance. The escort had a dry, lined face upon which, not ornamentally but as a matter of course, there grew a business man’s short moustache; and his thin neck showed an Adam’s apple, but not conspicuously, for there was nothing conspicuous about him. Baldish, dim, quiet, he was an unnoticeable part of this festival, and although there were a dozen or more middle-aged men present, not casually to be distinguished from him in general aspect, he was probably the last person in the big house at whom a stranger would have glanced twice. It did not enter George’s mind to mention to Miss Morgan that this was his father, or to say anything whatever about him.
Mr. Minafer shook his son’s hand unobtrusively in passing.
“I’ll take Uncle John home,” he said, in a low voice. “Then I guess I’ll go on home myself—I’m not a great hand at parties, you know. Good-night, George.”
George murmured a friendly enough good-night without pausing. Ordinarily he was not ashamed of the Minafers; he seldom thought about them at all, for he belonged, as most American children do, to the mother’s family—but he was anxious not to linger with Miss Morgan in the vicinity of old John, whom he felt to be a disgrace.
He pushed brusquely through the fringe of calculating youths who were gathered in the arches, watching for chances to dance only with girls who would soon be taken off their hands, and led his stranger lady out upon the floor. They caught the time instantly, and were away in the waltz.