Mr. King saluted Stella with one of his most fascinating smiles. He bowed, too, in a courtly way, which made her catch her breath a little. “I’m delighted,” he murmured.
And Stella, her eyes strangely full of light, paused just short of exclaiming: “There’s something about you—something I seem to remember....”
Elsa prepared to dance off with her impatient partner, but turned to her father, who had strolled up, and warned him with dry playfulness: “Please keep an eye on them, and don’t let them get so interested in each other that they forget about supper, because Stella has that dance taken—haven’t you, Stella?” She had been unflagging and a little brazen in her friend’s behalf.
“I believe so,” fluttered Stella, excitedly glancing at her card, though in truth, her face all alight with momentarily realized dreams, she wasn’t much concerned over the possibility of any mere individual’s being able to subtract her attention from the glittering whole. Nevertheless, that is exactly what did happen. She fell right into the trap Elsa had mockingly cautioned against; and this is how it all came about.
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.