“Dear Captain Selwyn,” she wheezed over the telephone, “I’m short one man; and we dine at eight and it’s that now. Could you help me?  It’s the rich and yellow, this time, but you won’t mind, will you?”

Selwyn, standing at the lower telephone in the hall, asked her to hold the wire a moment, and glanced up at his sister who was descending the stairs with Eileen, dinner having at that instant been announced.

“Mrs. T. West Minster—­flying signals of distress,” he said, carefully covering the transmitter as he spoke; “man overboard, and will I kindly take a turn at the wheel?”

“What a shame!” said Eileen; “you are going to spoil the first home dinner we have had together in weeks!”

“Tell her to get some yellow pup!” growled Austin, from above.

“As though anybody could get a yellow pup when they whistle,” said Nina hopelessly.

“That’s true,” nodded Selwyn; “I’m the original old dog Tray.  Whistle, and I come padding up.  Ever faithful, you see.”

And he uncovered the transmitter and explained to Mrs. T. West Minster his absurd delight at being whistled at.  Then he sent for a cab and sauntered into the dining-room, where he was received with undisguised hostility.

“She’s been civil to me,” he said; “jeunesse oblige, you know.  And that’s why I—­”

“There’ll be a lot of debutantes there!  What do you want to go for, you cradle robber!” protested Austin—­“a lot of water-bibbing, olive-eating, talcum-powdered debutantes—­”

Eileen straightened up stiffly, and Selwyn’s teasing smile and his offered hand in adieu completed her indignation.

“Oh, good-bye!  No, I won’t shake hands.  There’s your cab, now.  I wish you’d take Austin, too; Nina and I are tired of dining with the prematurely aged.”

“Indeed, we are,” said Mrs. Gerard; “go to your club, Austin, and give me a chance to telephone to somebody under the anesthetic age.”

Selwyn departed, laughing, but he yawned in his cab all the way to Fifty-third Street, where he entered in the wake of the usual laggards and, surrendering hat and coat in the cloak room, picked up the small slim envelope bearing his name.

The card within disclosed the information that he was to take in Mrs. Somebody-or-Other; he made his way through a great many people, found his hostess, backed off, stood on one leg for a moment like a reflective water-fowl, then found Mrs. Somebody-or-Other and was absently good to her through a great deal of noise and some Spanish music, which seemed to squirt through a thicket of palms and bespatter everybody.

“Wonderful music,” observed his dinner partner, with singular originality; “so like Carmen.”

“Is it?” he replied, and took her away at a nod from his hostess, whose daughter Dorothy leaned forward from her partner’s arm at the same moment, and whispered:  “I must speak to you, mamma!  You can’t put Captain Selwyn there because—­”