The others have all come up now, and Dom, who is terribly conversational, opens the ball. ‘What are you now, James?’ asks he. ‘General?’ ‘Not quite,’ responds James gruffly, who naturally objects to being chaffed in the presence of the beloved one. ‘Colonel? Eh?’ ‘Don’t be stupid, Dom,’ says Susan suddenly. ‘He is a lieutenant, but soon he’ll be a captain—won’t you, James? Come up here and take part of my rug.’ ‘Oh no! no!’ says James, in a nervous, flurried tone that is filled with absolute adoration; ‘I like being here.’ ‘But——’ ‘My dear Susan, why interfere with his mad joy?’ says Dom in a whisper that is meant to be perfectly audible, and is so, to all around. ‘He’ll catch cold to a moral; and he’s frightfully uncomfortable. But to sit at your feet: what comfort could compare with that?’ ‘Several,’ says Susan calmly. ‘Come here, James. I want to talk to you.’ And, indeed, from this moment she devotes herself to the devoted James. Crosby she ignores completely, and when at last he rises to go, she says ‘good-bye’ to him with a very conventional air. ‘Are you really going—and so soon?’ The others have moved a little away from them. ‘What is the good of my staying when you won’t even look at me?’ ‘I am looking at you,’ says Susan, flushing scarlet, but compelling her eyes to rest on his—for a moment only, however. ‘But—you know I don’t like you to allude to that day.’ ‘It was a very small allusion. It gave you’—slowly—‘your chance, however.’ ‘My chance?’ ‘To amuse yourself with the man of war.’ ‘You think that I——’ ‘I think a good deal at times.’ He laughs lightly, if a little anxiously. ‘I am thinking even now.’ ‘Of me?’ ‘Naturally’—smiling. ‘Am I not always thinking of you?’ ‘But what—what?’ demands she imperiously, tapping her slender foot upon the ground. ‘That you do not believe the martial James so hideous after all.’ ‘Then you are wrong—quite wrong’—vehemently. ‘Yes? Well, then, I think now——’ ‘Now?’ ‘That you are a very dangerous little coquette.’ Susan’s colour fades. A frown wrinkles her lovely brow. ‘I am not!’ says she coldly. ‘If all your thinking has only come to that—I—despise your thoughts.’ It is the nearest approach to a quarrel he has ever had with her; but, instead of depressing him, it seems to exalt him, and he goes on his way apparently rejoicing. CHAPTER LV. ‘There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my love, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate.’