notwithstanding his present
detachment and a seriousness that verged on sullenness, the face seemed
more patterned by nature for the broad grin of good fellowship and clean
mirthfulness.

Quite obviously Len Haswell, whose laugh ordinarily rang like a fog-horn
over the chorus of conversation, would just now have preferred being
elsewhere. When their customary joviality left those gray eyes, the
man's immensity took on something of an ogre's power. He tinkled the
ice in his high-ball glass--a process to which he had devoted himself
with unaccustomed repetition this evening and, instead of mellowing into
conviviality under his libations, his eyes narrowed a little and the
small frowning line between his brows deepened.

"The Big Fellow's having a grouch, eh, what? He's getting a bit squiffy,
if you ask me," suggested Norvil Thayre to the group centered where the
punch-bowl was being administered. Norvil Thayre was not having a
grouch. If he had ever had a grouch he had kept his secret well. An
American by adoption, he was still aggressively British in speech, dress
and eccentricity.

Norvil Thayre's chest was always thrust out as cheerily and confidently
as a cock-robin's, and his step was as elastic as though he had just
come, freshly galvanized, from some electric source of exuberant energy.
His clothing escaped the extremes of fashion by the narrowest margin of
good taste, and his mustache ends bristled up toward the laughing
wrinkles about his wide-awake eyes like exclamation points of alertness.

"And," went on Mr. Thayre amiably, "if he hungers for solitude I'm the
last chap in the world to intrude on his meditations. I jolly well know
myself what it means to hang precariously on the fringe of plutocracy
with only a beastly whisper of an income--and by the Lord Harry I'm a
bachelor." Several auditors nodded their sympathetic understanding, but
a tall youth with viking blond hair and vacant eyes which seemed to
proclaim, "I am looking, but I see not," was less judicious. He lounged
over and dropped into a chair at Haswell's side.

"That singularly frightful little ass, Larry Kirk, is going to cheer
him up now," smiled Thayre. "Trust him to make himself a nuisance."

"Not dancing much this evening, Len?" suggested Kirk by way of opening
the conversation with the silent one.

"No." The reply was curt.

"I've been wanting to dance with your wife," persisted the other, "but
she's as illusive as a wraith."

Th