Mrs. Weyman had taken it upon herself to play hostess for the so unusually obscured Joan. And Joan blessed her future mother-in-law for that. But for all her activity, Mrs. Weyman was not so oblivious as she appeared to be of the two very quiet people withdrawn there from the social group in the dark shadow of the great urn. Her eyes wandered in their direction constantly, and she was deeply excited and hopeful. She, like Anne and Ariel, had her “hunch” that to-night might make Hugh supremely happy. Meanwhile, she was doing her best to keep the social atmosphere from requiring Joan’s attentions by being particularly entertaining herself; and this in spite of Glenn’s unhelpful somberness, Anne’s staccato and unnatural cheerfulness, and that strange creature Michael Schwankovsky’s bearish gambolings. Ariel was not counting, so far as Mrs. Weyman was aware, either for or against her efforts at harmonizing the little group. She was too elusive out here by moonlight, where her voice, flat and pebble cool, was heard only now and then in some quite commonplace, careful answer to somebody’s direct question to her. In Charlie Frye she found her stand-by. Mrs. Weyman put him down, once and for all, in her mental notebook this night as a perfect filler-in for future dinner parties at Wild Acres. “Come along, Ariel!” Schwankovsky boomed suddenly, interrupting Charlie Frye in a really amusing anecdote he was telling. “The time has come when you must dance for me. I will make the music. We shall not be together again for months. Unbearable to think it! So for my consolation you are to dance now!” His arm around her shoulder, he was drawing Ariel into the lighted music room and toward the piano with him. “Oh, Ariel! How delicious! Please do,” Anne cried, jumping up and turning over her chair in her relief at something at last happening in the breathless atmosphere of the terrace. And she followed them in, leaving Charlie Frye’s story hanging in mid-air, just as it was, half told. Mrs. Weyman could do nothing to rescue his anecdote for the embarrassed young man. She could only get up, with him, and follow the noise into the drawing-room, where they sat beside each other, two defeated social captains, on a little Queen Anne sofa, just inside the long window through which they had entered. “This may be interesting. Do you suppose she will?” Joan asked, out in the dark, putting her hand through Hugh’s arm and edging him along the railing to a better view of the interior. Schwankovsky was playing MacDowell’s “Water Lily.” Ariel was sitting on the end of the piano bench, while Anne bent over her, begging her please to dance, and Glenn stood before her, adding his urgings. Then suddenly Anne was kneeling before Ariel. She was stripping off Ariel’s silver slippers and her stockings. Hugh moved abruptly, and Joan’s hand fell lifeless through his arm and to her side. Hugh was striding toward the windows.