‘In that case, she’s shunted you.’

‘No!—­Impossible!’ His mouth went like an O,—­and his eyes ditto, his eyeglass clattering down on to his shirt front.  ’I expect the mistake’s mine.  Fact is, I’ve made a mess of my programme.  It’s either the last dance, or this dance, or the next, that I’ve booked with her, but I’m hanged if I know which.  Just take a squint at it, there’s a good chap, and tell me which one you think it is.’

I ’took a squint’—­since he held the thing within an inch of my nose I could hardly help it; one ‘squint,’ and that was enough—­ and more.  Some men’s ball programmes are studies in impressionism, Percy’s seemed to me to be a study in madness.  It was covered with hieroglyphics, but what they meant, or what they did there anyhow, it was absurd to suppose that I could tell,—­I never put them there!—­Proverbially, the man’s a champion hasher.

’I regret, my dear Percy, that I am not an expert in cuneiform writing.  If you have any doubt as to which dance is yours, you’d better ask the lady,—­she’ll feel flattered.’

Leaving him to do his own addling I went to find my coat,—­I panted to get into the open air; as for dancing I felt that I loathed it.  Just as I neared the cloak-room someone stopped me.  It was Dora Grayling.

‘Have you forgotten that this is our dance?’

I had forgotten,—­clean.  And I was not obliged by her remembering.  Though as I looked at her sweet, grey eyes, and at the soft contours of her gentle face, I felt that I deserved well kicking.  She is an angel,—­one of the best!—­but I was in no mood for angels.  Not for a very great deal would I have gone through that dance just then, nor, with Dora Grayling, of all women in the world, would I have sat it out.—­So I was a brute and blundered.

’You must forgive me, Miss Grayling, but—­I am not feeling very well, and—­I don’t think I’m up to any more dancing.—­Good-night.’

CHAPTER XI

A MIDNIGHT EPISODE

The weather out of doors was in tune with my frame of mind,—­I was in a deuce of a temper, and it was a deuce of a night.  A keen north-east wind, warranted to take the skin right off you, was playing catch-who-catch-can with intermittent gusts of blinding rain.  Since it was not fit for a dog to walk, none of your cabs for me,—­nothing would serve but pedestrian exercise.

So I had it.

I went down Park Lane,—­and the wind and rain went with me,—­also, thoughts of Dora Grayling.  What a bounder I had been,—­and was!  If there is anything in worse taste than to book a lady for a dance, and then to leave her in the lurch, I should like to know what that thing is,—­when found it ought to be made a note of.  If any man of my acquaintance allowed himself to be guilty of such a felony in the first degree, I should cut him.  I wished someone would try to cut me,—­I should like to see him at it.