* * * * *

I resolved, as I saw myself lying shattered at my own feet, to pick up the bits and say nothing to Jack, lest he should blame his own inadvertent dropping of my name for all present and future mischief.  Being a man, he can see things only with his eyes; and as he happened to be looking at me, he missed the pantomime at the other end of the room.  I was looking at him too, but of course that didn’t prevent me from seeing other things; and while I was chatting with him, and wondering how long it might be before the thunderbolt (Monsieur Charretier) should fall, I received another invitation to dance.  This time it was from a delightful old boy who looked sixty and felt twenty-one.

He was ruddy-brown, with tight gray curls on his head, and deep dimples in his cheeks.  If anyone had told me that he was not an English admiral I should have known it was a fib.

“I hope you aren’t engaged for this next waltz?” said he.  “I should like very much to have it with you.”  And he spoke as nicely as he would to a young girl of his own world, although he must have heard from someone that I was a lady’s maid.

I glanced at Jack, but evidently he approved of admirals as partners for his sister.  He kept himself in the background, smiling benevolently, and I skipped away with my brown old sailor, as the music for the dance began.

“Heard you spoke English,” said he, encircling my Directoire waist with the arm of a sea-going Hercules, “otherwise I shouldn’t have had the courage to come up and speak to you.”

I laughed.  “A Dreadnought afraid of a fishing-smack!”

“My word, if you were a fishin’-smack, my little friend, you wouldn’t lack for fish to catch,” chuckled the old gentleman, who was waltzing like an elderly angel—­as all sailors do.  Now, if Bertie had said what he said, I should have been offended, but coming from the admiral it cheered me up.

“You are an admiral, aren’t you?” I was bold enough to ask.

“Who told you that?” he wanted to know.

“My eyes,” said I.

“They’re bright ones,” he retorted.  “But I suppose I do look an old sea-dog—­what?  A regular old salt-water dog.  But by George, it’s hot water I’ve got into to-night.  D’ye see that stout lady we’re just passin’?—­the one in the red wig and yellow frock covered with paste or diamonds?”

(If she could have heard the description!  It was Lady Turnour, in her gold tissue, her Bond Street jewellery shop, and, my charge, her beautifully undulated, copper-tinted transformation.)

“Yes, I see her,” I said faintly, as we waltzed past; and I wondered why she was glaring.

“I suppose you didn’t notice me doin’ the first dance with her?  Well, I asked her because they said we’d all got to invite servants to begin with, and as the best were snapped up before I got a chance, I walked over to her like a man.  Give you my word, where all are dressed like duchesses, I took her for a cook.”