"And you will dance with me? I love dancing, and I don't know many people. Of course Katherine will see that I am not neglected, but I should like to _depend_ on you; and if I am left sitting alone in a corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be responsible for me?" Her smiling eyes met the badly controlled emotion of his look. "Hilda, you are quite frivolous." Terms of reckless endearment were on his lips; he hardly knew how he kept them down. "How shall I manoeuvre that you be left sitting alone in corners? Remember that if the miracle occurs I shall come, whether you beckon or no." CHAPTER VIII Odd was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he would see her at the Meltons' on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that might, Odd felt, have held an embarrassing consciousness for Katherine had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety. The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton's apartment--one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne--and after greeting his hostess, he waited for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine's smooth dark head, the Captain's correctly impassive good looks, and Hilda's loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility as acute as a fond mother's, he saw--felt, even--the stir, the ripple of inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of a concourse of people certainly constitutes homage, however unconscious of aim be the conqueror. To Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the very air with sudden perfume. "Her dear little head," "Her lovely little head," he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of. Then, turning to Hilda-- "The white satin _does_," he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen people already. "See that Hilda, in her _embarras de choix_, doesn't become too much embarrassed," she said to Peter. "Exercise for her a brotherly discretion."