ssary and genuine. Dowling waited for
her, and when she came out he explained for the fourth or fifth time how
the accident had happened. "It was entirely those other people's fault,"
he said. "They got me in a kind of a corner, because neither of those
fellows knows the least thing about guiding; they just jam ahead and
expect everybody to get out of their way. It was Charlotte Thom's
diamond crescent pin that got caught on your dress in the back and made
such a----"

"Never mind," Alice said in a tired voice. "The maid fixed it so that
she says it isn't very noticeable."

"Well, it isn't," he returned. "You could hardly tell there'd been
anything the matter. Where do you want to go? Mother's been interfering
in my affairs some more and I've got the next taken."

"I was sitting with Mrs. George Dresser. You might take me back there."

He left her with the matron, and Alice returned to her picture-making,
so that once more, while two numbers passed, whoever cared to look was
offered the sketch of a jolly, clever girl preoccupied with her elders.
Then she found her friend Mildred standing before her, presenting Mr.
Arthur Russell, who asked her to dance with him.

Alice looked uncertain, as though not sure what her engagements were;
but her perplexity cleared; she nodded, and swung rhythmically away with
the tall applicant. She was not grateful to her hostess for this alms.
What a young hostess does with a fiance, Alice thought, is to make him
dance with the unpopular girls. She supposed that Mr. Arthur Russell had
already danced with Ella Dowling.

The loan of a lover, under these circumstances, may be painful to the
lessee, and Alice, smiling never more brightly, found nothing to say to
Mr. Russell, though she thought he might have found something to say to
her. "I wonder what Mildred told him," she thought. "Probably she said,
'Dearest, there's one more girl you've got to help me out with. You
wouldn't like her much, but she dances well enough and she's having a
rotten time. Nobody ever goes near her any more.'"

When the music stopped, Russell added his applause to the hand-clapping
that encouraged the uproarious instruments to continue, and as they
renewed the tumult, he said heartily, "That's splendid!"

Alice gave him a glance, necessarily at short range, and found his eyes
kindly and pleased. Here was a friendly soul, it appeared, who probably
"liked everybody." No doubt he had applauded for an "encore" w