. If your dancing manual told you at a given time to be
perpendicular, you had to be, automatically--and that was Nick!

"But what on earth, Susy," Gillow's puzzled voice suddenly came to her
as from immeasurable distances, "Are you going to do in this beastly
stifling hole for the rest of the summer?"

"Ask Nick, my dear fellow," Strefford answered for her; and: "By the
way, where is Nick--if one may ask?" young Breckenridge interposed,
glancing up to take belated note of his host's absence.

"Dining out," said Susy glibly. "People turned up: blighting bores that
I wouldn't have dared to inflict on you." How easily the old familiar
fibbing came to her!

"The kind to whom you say, 'Now mind you look me up'; and then spend the
rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses," Strefford amplified.

The Hickses--but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went through
Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed became a
hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly: "I'll call him up there
after dinner--and then he will feel silly"--but only to remember that
the Hickses, in their mediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied
themselves a telephone.

The fact of Nick's temporary inaccessibility--since she was now
convinced that he was really at the Hickses'--turned her distress to a
mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried his principles, his
standards, or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenly
begun to apply to the old game! It was stupid of her not to have guessed
it at once.

"Oh, the Hickses--Nick adores them, you know. He's going to marry Coral
next," she laughed out, flashing the joke around the table with all her
practiced flippancy.

"Lord!" grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince displayed the
unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing every morning
with his Mueller exercises.

Suddenly Susy felt Strefford's eyes upon her.

"What's the matter with me? Too much rouge?" she asked, passing her arm
in his as they left the table.

"No: too little. Look at yourself," he answered in a low tone.

"Oh, in these cadaverous old looking-glasses-everybody looks fished up
from the canal!"

She jerked away from him to spin down the long floor of the sala, hands
on hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince and young Breckenridge
caught her up, and she spun back with the latter, while Gillow-it was
believed to be his sole accomplishment-snapped his f