“I wonder if you are my great-great-grandfather or my great-great-greatest?” she asked gayly. “Your brother, perhaps. Your wig looks every bit as old as mine.” “That was rather neat.” She swept him a curtsey, diligently practised before the psyche mirror; her spine was limbering. “If I were really your brother I suppose I should have offered you my congratulations before this. Let us imagine I was off hunting Indians and only returned in time for the ball. . . . Eustace is a lucky dog!” He was staring very hard at Gita, who in her gown of gold tissue and high-piled white wig above those black eyes and lashes that he had thought of more than once, seemed to him almost fantastically lovely. The sort of girl, he imagined, who, had she lived in a remoter era than the one she had conjured up tonight, would have had men besieging her tower and riding to battle with her ribbon on their lances. “Thanks. Doesn’t he look the real thing? He padded out his governor’s uniform so that he would look portly and important.” “He certainly looks older,” said Pelham, regarding Bylant critically, “but as determined as Fate.” “What do you mean by that?” asked Gita sharply. “Oh—the expression’s gone. He’s no longer looking at you; he’s meditating another glass of punch.” “You must have one, yourself. Come with me and I’ll ladle it out for you. And introduce you to the other girls.” “But I don’t dance.” “Then you can sit out with me. I don’t dance, either.” She helped him to the punch and introduced him casually. Polly’s eyes glittered and she took him firmly by the arm as the musicians began to play a fox-trot. “Never mind if you don’t know how,” she said, as he protested, almost in panic. “Any man who can wear that get-up like a native—or should I say to the manor born?—can learn to dance in five minutes. Just take my hand and a good grip on my back and I’ll do the rest.” Gita looked on with a faint throb of resentment. She remembered that Pelham’s conversation had interested her, and had intended to take him into the drawing-room. To her amazement he fell into step almost at once, and smiled down with evident appreciation into the ingenuous orbs of his teacher, who had flung her train over her arm and was dancing with her usual abandon. “Well, are you satisfied? Your inspiration is a thundering success.” It was Eustace who was smiling down at _her_. He looked large and dignified in his governor’s uniform and white wig, and a massive gold chain was slung about his neck; but for the first time his narrow pointed beard did not deflect attention from his rather plump cheeks and his lower lip had lost its muscular compression. “Oh, yes—it looks like it.” But she had drawn her brows together and looked the reverse of contented. “You’ve got yourself pretty well into your part. I don’t know that I like you so well. . . .”