‘Susan,’ says Crosby, as they pause at the end of the room, ‘I consider your conduct distinctly immoral! The way you have been going on—’ ‘Who—I?’ ‘Yes, you! Don’t attempt to deny it. Your open flirtation with Lennox—’ ‘What?’ Susan lifts her dewy eyes to his. Suddenly she breaks into the merriest laughter. ‘You’re too funny for anything,’ says she. ‘Not for another dance, I hope.’ He laughs too, and so gaily. And again his arm is round her, and away they go once more, dancing to the big lady’s happiest strains. There is a conservatory off the music-room, and into this he leads her presently. ‘You have no flowers,’ says he. ‘I must give you some. These roses will suit you.’ ‘They suit Lady Muriel too,’ says Susan, remembering. ‘Yes? Oh yes! I gave them to her this morning. Well, it shan’t be roses, then. These pink begonias?’ ‘I should like those better,’ says Susan; she takes them tranquilly. It is, of course, quite right that he should wish to give her flowers different from those he has just given his _fiancée_. She had reminded him just in time. Crosby is thankful for her suggestion, but for very different reasons. He had forgotten about Lady Muriel’s roses, and to give her the same— ‘The rain is clearing away,’ says he, looking out of the window. ‘Still’—as if to himself—‘I think we had better take an umbrella.’ ‘An umbrella?’ ‘On our way home.’ ‘Mr. Crosby’—eagerly—‘you need not take me home. You must not. There is really no necessity. Oh!’—anxiously, thinking of Lady Muriel and his desire to be with her—‘I hope you won’t come.’ ‘That is not very civil, Susan, is it?’ says he, smiling. He pauses and looks suddenly at her, a new expression growing in his eyes. ‘Of course, if you have arranged to go home with anyone else—’ ‘No—no indeed. But to take you away from your guests—’ ‘My guests will live without me for half an hour, I have no doubt.’ His tone is quite its old joyous self again. ‘And I promised your aunt to see that you got safely back to her, and, as the children say, “a promise is a promise.” Here are your begonias. Shall I fasten them in for you?’ He arranges them under her pretty chin, she holding up her head to let him do it, and then they go back to the music-room, where Sir William catches him and carries him off for something or other. Susan, sinking into a chair, finds Josephine Prior almost immediately beside her. ‘Those pretty begonias!’ says she. ‘How they suit you, though hardly your frock! Of course’—with elephantine archness—‘I need not ask who gave them to you. Mr. Crosby is always showering little favours on his women friends. Those roses to Lady Muriel’—Susan holds her breath a moment—‘and these begonias to you, and opera-tickets to others, and last night such a delicious box of _marron glaces_ to me.’ She forgets to add that he gave a similar box to each of his lady guests, having run up to Dublin in the morning and brought them back with him from Mitchell’s.