She was so quiet, so white at supper that Grant Proctor, who was already in love with her, begged her to let him give her a drink from his pocket flask, but she refused, scarcely knowing what he had said to her. Once she caught her mother’s eyes, and shivered at the anxiety and reproach in them. Suddenly a fierce resentment against Enid Barr rose and beat sickeningly in her blood. If she had not interfered, she and David would have been married long ago. They would have been happy in poverty, would have struggled side by side to banish poverty, might even have had a tiny David and Sally of their own by this time. And now David was irrevocably gone, so that Enid Barr might keep her daughter. Sally wanted to nurse her anger against her mother, but it was impossible to do so, for she loved her. When the jazz orchestra was hilariously summoning the debutantes to the dance floor again Arthur Van Horne claimed Sally over the protests of the half dozen younger men who were good-naturedly wrangling for the honor. “You’re going to meet me after this foolish, delightful show is over, aren’t you? Of course you are!” he smiled down upon her as he led her out upon the floor. Sally looked up at him wearily and saw that there was more than amusement and gallantry in his narrowed, smiling black eyes. There was menace, which he did not try to conceal, wanted her to see— “You do love your mother, don’t you?” he smiled significantly. “Maybe you’ll learn to love Van a little, too. It would be—very wise.” It was half past four o’clock when the tireless debutantes were willing to call it a night. Sally braved the thing out, but her face was wan as she listened to the last compliments on the success of the party which had officially launched her into the circles of society to which her mother belonged by the divine right of inheritance and immense wealth. “We’ll talk it all over tomorrow, sweetheart,” Enid said pityingly. “You run along to bed now. I’ve got to give a few instructions to Randall. And you’d better stay in bed all day, or until tea time anyway. You were marvelous tonight, darling. So beautiful, so sweet. These wild young flappers—but run along, daughter beloved. You look as if you might faint with fatigue. Have Ernestine bring you some hot milk.” It was ridiculously easy for Sally to slip out of the house, using the servants’ entrance, as Van Horne had suggested. She found him waiting for her and submitted wearily to being led to where his car was parked, a block away. “What do you want, Van?” she asked abruptly, when the car turned into Central Park from Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fourth street, the wheels crunching the glazed crust of new snow. “To talk with you and hold your hand and possibly kiss you—oh, very possibly!” Van Horne laughed at her, reaching for her hand.