ertained by a
vacuous young man with an eyeglass, who looked as if he'd already had
quite as much Bubbley as was good for him. He laughed incessantly;
wrangling with the waiter, calling to friends across the room.

As the Honourable Jim passed, this eyeglassed young man signalled wildly
to him, and took up a paper "dart" into which he'd twisted his
menu-card. He flung it--and missed.

It stuck in the hair of one of the girls who was dancing. And then there
was a little gale of laughter and protests and calls, and the eyeglassed
young man put two fingers in his mouth and whistled piercingly to Mr.
Burke, who strode over to him, laughing, and cuffed him on the side of
the head. Then they began a sort of mock fight, and a waiter came up and
whispered and was pushed out of the way, and there was more laughter.

The attention of the room was caught by the two skirmishing, ragging
young men. They were for the moment the centre of the whirl and swirl of
colour and noise and rowdy laughter.

"There you are, Miss Lovelace. You see the kind of thing it is," said an
austere voice behind me. I turned from the gay picture to a gloomy
one--the face of Mr. Reginald Brace, more than ever that of a young
Puritan soldier--a Roundhead, in fact--left over from the Reformation,
and looking on at some feasting of the courtiers of Charles II. So far,
I hadn't see anything very terrible in the giddy scene before us; it was
loud, it was rowdy, rather silly, perhaps, but quite amusing (I thought)
to watch!

Mr. Brace evidently took it quite differently.

He said: "Will this convince you? By Jove! how disgusting." Mr. Burke
had now got the other young man down on the carpet. His glossily shod
feet waved wildly in the air. People from the tables farthest away stood
up to see what was happening. A slim American flapper of sixteen, with
the black hair-ribbons bobbing behind her, skipped up on her chair to
look. The Honourable Jim Burke stepped back, showing his white teeth in
his cheeriest grin, and one of the other youths at the table helped the
eyeglassed one to struggle to his feet.

"Who is that? Do you know?" I asked Mr. Brace.

He answered morosely: "Yes, I'm afraid I do. It was with his
introduction that that fellow Burke came to me. That's Lord
Fourcastles."

The noble lord seemed to have quite a fancy for throwing things
about--for first he made his table-napkin into a rabbit and slung it at
the waiter's head; and then he picked