As I explained to you in asking the favour, I guessed that Caspian meant
to score over me, so I wanted to be the one to do the scoring. I thought
if I simply swaggered into the ballroom as one of Caspian's guests, he
was certain to repudiate me, which would have been rather amusing if it
hadn't made me conspicuous. It was, as you remarked, something of a risk
to appear at all in such a place on such an occasion, but I've trusted
to luck so often and come out on the top of the wave (literally!) that I
didn't mind, provided I could jog along quietly, and get in even one
dance with my little princess. I felt safe under your respectable wing,
and was looking forward to the fun of not exploding if Caspian had laid
a fuse to blow me up. But Strickland, think of it, _she_ had been
suffering for my sake!

When I went to ask her for our dance, I found her deadly pale. "What is
the matter?" I jerked out, actually scared by her whiteness. "Are you
faint? Shall I take you into the open air?"

"Oh, please do!" she said; and I whisked her out quickly onto one of
those verandas as wide as a room.

"Could we go home?" she asked piteously, but when I suggested making a
dash into the ballroom to find her pal, Mrs. Winston, she wouldn't hear
of it. "No," she said, "Molly mustn't be disturbed. It is nothing.
Only--I should like to go. If you wouldn't mind."

If I wouldn't _mind_! It would have been pretty well worth being born
for to drive her back alone, just we two in the car, but I dared not
take the child at her word. I thought she was too ill to remember Mrs.
Grundy's silly old existence, and I couldn't take advantage of her
forgetfulness. At the same time it seemed the act of a prig grafted on
to a bounder to put the idea into her head, and make her ashamed of
having said the wrong thing. You see what a nuisance my conscience is! I
petted it so much when it was young, now it won't stop in its cage. I
didn't know what to say, and felt as if it would be money in my pocket
not to have been born, for my spirit had melted in me, as one of those
soft capsules melts in your mouth.

I don't know what I should have said or done, my mental state being that
of a hen in front of a motor, if at that instant Mrs. Winston herself
hadn't appeared. It was as if my subconscious self had made a dash and
dragged her out by the hair! Winston was with her (as Mrs. Shuster
ingenuously remarked one day, "That man is as nice to his wife as if he
were so