g, Lady
Kingsmead?"

"No, I don't think so. He telephoned just before dinner--_oh_!"

She broke off, and everyone turned towards the door as it opened noisily
to admit a stout, red-faced man, who stood hesitating on the threshold,
not as much apparently from shyness as from a kind of bodily stammer of
movement.

"Ponty!"

"Awfully sorry, Tony," explained Lord Pontefract, advancing towards his
hostess, "awfully sorry, but that idiot Hendricks got a telephone
message wrong, and I thought I couldn't come. So when I found out, I
thought 'better late than never,' though I _had_ dined. Please say
'better late than never.'"

"Better late than never," chanted the whole party dissonantly, and room
was made for the new-comer between Brigit and Yelverton.

"That fool Shover nearly broke my neck, too," he confided, sitting down
and lowering his voice confidentially. "I--I thought for a second I
should never see you again."

She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. He had been drinking.
No one had ever seen Oscar Pontefract drunk, but as time went on the
honourable body of those who had ever seen him perfectly sober
diminished rapidly.

"Haven't seen you for ten days. Damnedest ten days I ever lived
through," he continued, helping himself to whisky and soda, "and most
infernal ten nights, too. Can't sleep for thinking of you," he added
hastily, as she at last turned and looked full at him.

She was twenty-five, and had lived in this _milieu_ for the past seven
years. It had begun by disgusting her, then for a time she had been
indifferent to it, and now for the last year it had been growing
steadily unbearable.

"_Dites donc_, Lady Brigit," began Joyselle in her left ear, and as she
listened to him she instinctively drew away from Pontefract, closer to
him. At dessert Kingsmead came sauntering in, less with the air of a
little boy allowed to appear with the fruit than of a gently interested
gentleman come to take a look at the strange beasts it amused him to
keep in a remote corner of his park.

He ate fruit in, to the unaccustomed eye, alarming quantities, and his
mother's guests discussed him exactly as if he had not been there.

A very plain little boy, Kingsmead, with stiff fair hair and many
freckles. But for his mouth a most unremarkable-looking person, for his
eyes, quick as those of a lizard, were pale blue in colour, and small.
But his mouth turned up at the corners in a peculiar and faun-like way,