not exactly understand; he found himself enmeshed
in a promise to meet every one else at the Town Hall with tea at the
Carterets' afterwards. Up to this point the fact that he was to appear
before the public with a blackened face had been diplomatically withheld
from him, and an equal diplomacy was shown on his arrival in the
deputing of Miss Fitzroy to break the news to him.

"Mrs. Carteret says it's really awfully becoming," said Fanny,
breathless and brilliant from assiduous practice of a hornpipe under
Captain Carteret's tuition, "and as for trouble! We might as well make a
virtue of necessity in this incredibly dirty place; my hands are black
already, and I've only swept the stage!"

She was standing at the edge of the platform that was to serve as the
stage, looking down at him, and it may be taken as a sufficient guide to
his mental condition that his abhorrence of the prospect for himself was
swallowed up by fury at the thought of it for her.

"Are you--do you mean to tell me you are going to dance _with a black
face_?" he demanded in bitter and incongruous wrath.

"No, I'm going to dance with Captain Carteret!" replied Fanny
frivolously, "and so can you if you like!"

She was maddeningly pretty as she smiled down at him, with her bright
hair roughened, and the afterglow of the dance alight in her eyes and
cheeks. Nevertheless, for one whirling moment, the old Adam, an Adam
blissfully unaware of the existence of Eve, asserted himself in Rupert.
He picked up his cap and stick without a word, and turned towards the
door. There, however, he was confronted by Mrs. Carteret, tugging at a
line of chairs attached to a plank, like a very small bird with a very
large twig. To refuse the aid that she immediately demanded was
impossible, and even before the future back row of the sixpennies had
been towed to its moorings, he realised that hateful as it would be to
stay and join in these distasteful revels, it would be better than going
home and thinking about them.

From this the intelligent observer may gather that absence had had its
traditional, but by no means invariable, effect upon the heart of Mr.
Gunning, and, had any further stimulant been needed, it had been
supplied in the last few minutes by the aggressive and possessive manner
of Captain Carteret.

The rehearsal progressed after the manner of amateur rehearsals. The
troupe, with the exception of Mr. Gunning, who remained wrapped in
silence, talked irr