Well, the cat was out of the bag: she was plain as well as undesirable.
Suddenly, Dionysus and his rout vanished from Thebes; temples and market-place sprang up again, and she remembered joyfully that a fresh packet of books ought to arrive to-morrow from the London Library.
Most of the guests not staying in the house had left by midnight; but after that, when the party had dwindled down to four or five couples, the pianist and fiddler, mellowed by champagne and oysters, were persuaded to give first one “extra,” then another, then another.
The pianist, a very anæmic-looking young woman, with a touching absence of class-jealousy, was loath to disappoint them, and, as far as she was concerned, they might have gone on having extras till broad daylight; but the fiddler “turned stunt.”
“I’m a family man” he protested good-humouredly, but firmly (“You’ll have to wait till to-morrow night for _that_, old bean!” Rory whispered to Arnold, “your wife wouldn’t like it at two o’clock in the morning”), “But I don’t mind ending up with _John Peel_, as it’s Christmas time,” whereupon, with a wink to the pianist, he struck up with that most poetical of tunes, and, the men of the party bellowing the words, they all broke into a boisterous gallop.
Rory went up to the Doña: “You _must_ dance this with me, please!”
She yielded with a smile; but her eye caught Arnold’s, and they both remembered that it had been Pepa who used always to play _John Peel_ at the end of their dances.
The tune ended with what means to be a flourish, but really is a wail, and they stood still, laughing and breathless—a little haggard, a little dishevelled.
“He went up to bed; he had a headache,” said Arnold, glaring fiercely at Teresa.
Out in the view, from behind the two-ply curtains of silk and of night, a cock crew, and then another; and what they said was just _John Peel_ over again—that ghosts wander in dewy English glades, and that the Past is dead, dead, dead.
Concha came into Teresa’s room to have her gown unfastened: “You looked heavenly,” she said, “I love you in mauve.”
Teresa tugged at the hooks in silence; and then said: “Is it impossible to teach Parker to unsqueeze hooks when they come back from Pullar’s?”