The others in the room laughed in mockery or applause. For an instant, Claude’s all-conquering look was replaced by a crestfallen one. But he quickly regained his poise and spirits. "Just a kiss to try," he said jauntily, as he attempted to recapture her arm. "It’s much too trying for gentle Janet," blithely chirped Mazie, who had danced into the room and taken in the situation, as Janet again turned away from Claude. AS a matter of fact, it was Janet’s sense of propriety in public that was offended more than anything else. As for Claude, he was only less mortified by the affront to his vanity than by the haunting fear that Janet’s rebuff came from genuine dislike. No girl had ever given the brilliant, impetuous Claude Fontaine a glance of undisguised repugnance. Janet spent the rest of the evening chiefly in conversation with Robert Lloyd and Mark Pryor. Meanwhile, Claude affected a complete indifference to her actions. He threw himself into the party with a mad abandon, and whipped up the conviviality with a riotous, headstrong wildness until everybody voted it the merriest evening in years. Amongst the other sex, he exploited to the utmost his patrician graces and masculine daring, and was so much the center of the occasion that the party might have been his rather than Janet’s. The women thought him magnificent, graceful, cruel—in a word, irresistible; the men laughed at his impudence, and envied or admired his readiness, effrontery and ease. And yet, as he showed his fine points triumphantly now to this adoring girl and now to that, his voice vibrated towards Janet. Janet took it all in, and continued talking to Robert with undisturbed satisfaction. She saw Claude pass recklessly from one favorite to another, and guessed easily that none of these was his real aim. When the party broke up, Claude induced Janet to listen to him alone for a moment. He was suddenly all contrition. To his whispered plea for forgiveness, she said, in a not unkindly tone: "Forgiveness for what? For advertising your emotions?" "For the kiss," he said, his voice full of sensuous charm. And he added, on a more audacious note: "I wish I could take it back." "Oh, do you? You’d better begin with the publicity." "Please forgive the kiss _and_ the publicity, Janet." "I’ll forgive the second when I forget the first," she replied, much more gaily than she intended, thus proving that Claude was not the only one in the grip of a resistless passion. Claude went home, satisfied that his daring had once again enabled him to snatch victory out of the arms of defeat. *CHAPTER TWELVE* *I* And so it had. None the less, the experience had taught Claude a lesson which, for once, he took to heart. He never again supposed that Janet’s friendship was to be had on the same terms as Mazie’s or even Cornelia’s.