Reassured to find that he had not let slip an opportunity of gaining information, he set himself once more to watch the glittering scene and observed that Caerleon invited Nadia to dance with him as soon as he had done his duty to the wives of the city fathers. He saw Madame O’Malachy’s thrill of anxious expectation as the King approached her, and divined instantly that the offer of such an honour was in itself equivalent to a proposal of marriage. But Nadia declined it, although her watchful mother softened the refusal by adding that she did not dance. “He shouldn’t have come to ask her himself,” soliloquised Mr Hicks, who knew a good deal more about the etiquette proper for royalty than did most of the exalted personages at whose Courts he sojourned. “Ought to have sent his brother, or his equerry--if he has one. And she had no business to refuse, anyway. A girl that don’t dance ought not to go to Court balls.” But although he turned away with a feeling of lordly contempt for people who could manage their affairs so badly, Mr Hicks took care not to lose sight of Nadia during the evening. More than half the programme had been gone through when he saw Cyril sauntering up to her. He also saw Nadia shiver slightly, then sit very erect, and he guessed that the fateful moment had come. “Will you sit out this dance with me?” asked Cyril, adjusting one of his sleeve-links as he spoke. The American, watching him, thought the action a piece of aristocratic rudeness, but Cyril was merely doing his best not to look towards Madame O’Malachy. If she should gain from his face an inkling of his compact with her daughter, she was quite capable, he was sure, of making a scene in public, supposing that she judged it to be to her interest to do so, and he felt much relieved when he had succeeded in avoiding her eye, and had left her engrossed in conversation with Mr Hicks. With Nadia on his arm, he led the way to one of the smaller balconies, which were curtained off from the corridors, and decorated with plants and palms, and here he found her a seat. “Caerleon may not be here just yet,” he said. “I saw him dancing with Madame Sertchaieff just now. He has to be civil to her, you know, as she is the War Minister’s wife.” He went on talking lightly in his ordinary tones, and did not testify any resentment when Nadia vouchsafed no answer to his cheerful commonplaces, but sat still, her rigid hands outstretched before her and locked in one another, until her face changed suddenly at the sound of a footstep without. “I was very lucky in getting off so soon,” said a voice, and Caerleon drew back the curtain and stood before them, in all the magnificence of the full-dress uniform of the Carlino Regiment. “I caught my spur in Madame Sertchaieff’s dress,” he went on, “and tore it so badly that she had to go and get it sewn up. Now, Cyril, old man, if you will add to your kindness by making yourself scarce for a little while, I shall be much obliged.”