"How do? Awfully glad to see you," murmured Mr Henry, repeating his formula parrotwise to each arrival. Edward Morgan passed gravely on into the ball-room with his fiancee. He felt nervous and out of his element. Functions of this description always bored him; he possessed no small talk, and dancing seemed to him a foolish pastime. Nevertheless he claimed two dances from Prudence, whose programme filled rapidly; and, having danced the first dance with her, retired to the outskirts, and leaned against the doorpost, watching the moving scene with eyes that looked with jealous insistence for Prudence's figure among the gay throng of dancers. Mrs Henry, who found time among her distractions to observe him, drew her husband's attention to the lounging figure, with the whispered injunction: "For goodness' sake take him into the card-room! He is making himself ridiculous." But Mr Morgan refused to be beguiled into the card-room. He maintained a determined stand near the door; and Prudence, whenever she left the room with her partner in search of rest at the finish of a dance, was conscious of his hungry watchfulness and the look of grave dissatisfaction in his eyes. She wished that he would not watch her; it was embarrassing. "He doesn't look much like the hero of the evening," one unconscious partner remarked to her as he steered her carefully through the press of people. "I wonder which is the lucky lady?--Some one with her eyes wide to the main chance, I imagine. I've been amusing myself with trying to pick her out. She is not conspicuous through attentiveness to him, anyhow. Do you know her?" "Yes," Prudence admitted, with face aflame. "Oh, I say! Point her out to me, will you? I am a new-comer, and out of the know." "No; I don't think I will." "That's the reproof courteous," he returned, slightly nettled. "You consider my remarks in bad taste." "I think them indiscreet," she answered. "You wouldn't feel very happy for instance if I laid claim to the honour." It never occurred to him to treat this speech seriously. He laughed as though it were a huge joke. "I'm not such a fool as I look," he said. "It was because I knew it was safe that I spoke so unguardedly to you." Later on in the evening he had cause to remember his indiscretion and to regret it. He noticed her with Edward Morgan, and observed with amazement the intimacy of the terms that held between them. It flashed into his mind with disconcerting conviction that what he had believed to be a joke was no jest after all. He had seen Mr Morgan speak to no one else, dance with no other partner. He pushed his inquiries further, and learned to his ever-increasing discomfiture that it was to Mr Morgan's fiancee he had made his unguarded remarks. CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.