her off at once to a
cooler room.

"It is too bad!" she muttered to herself. "The Lancers! To go romping
round with a lot of wild young men and women. It is as bad as the Queen
in Hamlet."

This was the last dance before supper. Vixen went in to the supper-room
presently with her attentive partner, who had kept by her side
devotedly while the lively scramble to good old English tunes was going
on in the dancing-room.

"Are you better?" he asked tenderly, fanning her with her big black
fan, painted with violets and white chrysanthemums. "The room is
abominably hot."

"Thanks. I'm quite well now. It was only a momentary faintness. But I
rather hate the Lancers, don't you?"

"Well, I don't know. I think, sometimes, you know, with a nice partner,
they're good fun. Only one can't help treading on the ladies' trains,
and they wind themselves round one's legs like snakes. I've seen
fellows come awful croppers, and the lady who has done it look so
sweetly unconcerned. But if one tears a lace flounce, you know, they
look daggers. It's something too dreadful to feel oneself walking into
honiton at ten guineas a yard, and the more one tries to extricate
oneself the more harm one does."

Vixen's supper was the merest pretence. Her mother sat opposite her,
with Captain Winstanley still in attendance. Vixen gave them one
scathing look, and then sat like an image of scorn. Her partner could
not get a word from her, and when he offered her the fringed end of a
cracker bonbon, she positively refused to have anything to do with it.

"Please don't," she said. "It's too inane. I couldn't possibly pretend
to be interested in the motto."

When she went back to the ball-room Captain Winstanley followed her and
claimed his waltz. The band was just striking up the latest love-sick
German melody, "_Weit von dir!_" a strain of drawling tenderness.

"You had better go and secure your supper," said Vixen coldly.

"I despise all ball-suppers. This one most particularly, if it were to
deprive me of my waltz."

Vixen shrugged her shoulders, and submitted to take those few
preliminary steps which are like the strong swimmer's shiverings on the
bank ere he plunges in the stream. And then she was whirling round to
the legato strains, "_Weit von dir! Weit von dir! Wo ist mein Lebens
Lust?--Weit von dir--Weit von dir!_"

Captain Winstanley's waltzing was simple perfection. It was not the
Liverpool Lurch, or the Scarborough Scramble, the Be