l try to find
her and be awfully agreeable to her. I'll feel better for it, I'm
sure."

The dancing was beginning as Patricia made her way slowly across the
great room to the laughing group where she had seen Doris Leighton but
a moment ago, and before she was halfway across Doris and a tall Turk
swung past her in the whirl of the newest dance, followed by Elinor and
Aladdin, and then by Griffin and the young king of the Black Isles.
Patricia stood still in sudden swift contrition.

"If I haven't forgotten all about Miss Jinny!" she thought
remorsefully. "How fearfully self-absorbed I'm getting to be. I'm a
perfect _pig_!"

She had a long search before she discovered the valiant Sinbad in a far
corner of the now deserted divan surrounded by a circle of kindred
spirits to whom Griffin had delivered her, holding her own with great
spirit and enjoyment among the dashing wit and pungent repartee.

Miss Jinny, at the sight of Patricia fluttering in among them in her
white gauzy draperies like some dainty moth, held out a reproving
finger.

"Why aren't you dancing?" she demanded sternly, her whiskers trembling
with the fervor of her interest. "What is Elinor up to that you're not
dancing?"

Patricia, abashed by being thus publicly admonished, murmured something
about its being only the first dance, and not knowing many people, but
Miss Jinny cut her short.

"Don't tell me," she said abruptly. "You ought to be dancing instead
of wasting your time on old ladies like me." Here there was a burst of
mirth at the incongruity of the words with Miss Jinny's ferocious
masculine aspect, but she silenced it with a wave of her hookah stem.
"Let me introduce the Second Calendar, who I hope knows enough
respectable young men here to see that you aren't a wall flower."

A good-natured, whole-some looking young man in the clothes of a
calendar, with a patch on his right eye, laid aside his long-necked
lute and rose with a bow.

"I'm usually known as Herbert Lester, Miss Kendall," he said, smiling
as he led her to the dancing floor. "Sinbad can tell you that my
mother was an old friend of your aunt. I've just learned that you and
your sister are students here. Have you seen the Haldens? They were
asking me about you a moment before the intermission, and I was
commissioned to hunt you up when I ran into the circle there in the
divan and was hypnotized by Sinbad's wonderful sea tales."

He rattled on all through the danc