"Don't let's talk any more for a while, Dobbin--I'd rather dance."

Descending the several steps from the box level to the common, they threaded their way through a jam of tables to the fringe of the dance-mad mob, in whose closely-packed, rocking and surging rout considerable imagination and ingenuity were required to find room.

Nevertheless Daubeney adroitly created a s.p.a.ce where none had been, and swinging smoothly away, they became one with and lost in the crush, their progress of necessity slow but amazingly easy, for Daubeney led with grace and skill.

Lucinda tried to forget her vexation in watching the faces of their fellow dancers and their styles, a diversion which seldom failed to flood her being, even when she was saddest, with sweetness and light.

All about them couples were practising every conceivable variety of step that could be executed to the rhythm beaten out by tireless drums whose timbre had all the grim and weirdly stimulating monotony of African tom-toms. Many contented themselves with a solemn, wellnigh ritualistic jigging by means of which they traversed the floor crab-wise, inch by inch. Others charged short distances at headlong speed, checked short, whirled madly, darted and swooped again with incredible agility, in a sort of corybantic frenzy. Still others favoured a tedious twirling, like amorous dervishes. Yet there were strangely few collisions....

Young things drifted by with faces buried in the shoulders of their partners, whether for shame or in somnambulism it was impossible to say.

Those who are always with us, locked as in a death-grapple, ploughed doggedly along with tense mouths and rapt eyes. Couples whose mutual pa.s.sion was stronger than feminine regard for the most carefully composed complexion, moved as one, her cheek glued to his. Portly and bedizened dowagers wore set smiles on lips that moved to inaudible counting, and their paid partners, professional young male dancers, that patient yet abstracted expression that tells of bandaged, swollen feet.

Little girls who apparently should have been at home, getting a good night's rest in preparation for a long school-day tomorrow, lifted up unformed, flower faces breathlessly to the hard, mature faces of the vulpine men who held them.

Lucinda saw those to whom this was adventure, those to whom it was romance, those to whom it was physical agony, and those to whom it was a source of soul-destroying ennui. She smelt the breath of sticky bodies and the cloying perfumes in which the optimistic reposed mistaken faith.

And all her movements were, like theirs, measured by the swing of that giggling, grunting, whistling, clanging, moaning band....

Suddenly she knew she had had enough.

"It's too crowded," she told Dobbin; and he nodded agreement. "Shall we stop when we get around to our box?"

Without warning more than a smothered cry of alarm in a woman's voice, Lucinda was struck by a wildly careering body with such force that she lost footing altogether and must have fallen but for Dobbin, who instantly tightened his hold and braced himself against the dead drag of her weight, this though the shock of collision almost carried him off his own feet.

Simultaneously the floor shook with the impact of two heavy falls. And clinging to Dobbin, a little dazed, Lucinda saw a strikingly pretty young woman, stunningly undressed, sprawling at her feet, and at a yard's distance a man in similar plight.

Derisive cackles and guffaws of clowns broke out on all sides, a s.p.a.ce was cleared round the unfortunates.

"Are you all right, Cinda?" Dobbin asked. She nodded and tried to smile.

"Sure you're not hurt?"

She shook her head vigorously, and by way of proof stood out of his arms, but swayed dizzily and, with a little apologetic laugh, caught at one of them again.

"All right," Dobbin said hastily. "Let's get out of this."

"No--wait!" Lucinda insisted. "Perhaps she's hurt."

She brushed his arm aside, only to discover that the overthrown woman had regained her feet, and now stood watching her partner in shrewish fury as, grinning foolishly, he scrambled up.

"You clumsy dumb-bell!" she stormed in a rasping voice that must have carried clearly half across the room. "I hope to Gawd I got enough sense not to dance with you again when you're pickled!"

And catching her first glimpse of the man's crimson face, Lucinda yielded all at once to Daubeney's insistence.

But she never quite knew how they got back to their table.

XIII

But even with the three sides of the box affording their false show of privacy, it never entered Lucinda's head to sit down and pretend nothing had happened, the instinct to fly at once from this theatre of disgrace was still predominant. Only for a moment she rested standing, while her eyes, darkly dilate, sought Daubeney's, which held a look of such heart-broken regret that they won a compa.s.sionate smile even in her hour of affliction, and somehow helped Lucinda pull together the rent and draggled garment of her dignity.

"At least," she said quietly, "Julie Allingham isn't here--thank Heaven for that! You saw him, of course?"

Dobbin made a vague gesture of sympathy: "Frightfully sorry...."

Lucinda shrugged. "Don't be. It wasn't your fault, it was I who insisted on coming here."

Her gaze veered to the floor; but the dancers had already swarmed over and abolished the break in their ranks, and though she looked beyond the sea of bobbing heads, to right and left, reviewing all she could see of the room, Bellamy was nowhere in sight.

"I presume we couldn't have been mistaken...." Dobbin ventured half-heartedly.

"No: it was Bel."

"Hoped we might have been misled by a resemblance. Somehow the poor devil didn't look quite like Bellamy."

"He's apt to look not quite like himself when he is--as the pretty lady with him so delicately put it--'pickled.'"

"Think he knew you?"

"Oh, yes; I saw him look directly at me just before we turned away."

Lucinda took up her wrap. "If you'll help me with this, Dobbin, I think I'd like to go."

"Afraid I'll have to ask you to wait a minute or two. I've got these to pay for...." Daubeney indicated the untasted gla.s.ses of lemonade they had ordered. "I've sent for our waiter."

"Then if you don't mind, I'll go ahead. Let me have the carriage check, and I'll wait in the car."

Daubeney surrendered the pasteboard slip, and Lucinda went out. The pa.s.sageway behind the boxes enabled her to gain the entrance without running the gauntlet of the floor, and she descended the stairs with her head slightly lowered, in panic hope that she might thereby escape recognition if bad luck would have it that she must meet Julie Allingham. But she was spared that misfortune.

At the street door she gave the attendant the carriage-check together with a coin. "And hurry, please!" The man saluted respectfully and vanished.

She waited restlessly just inside the gla.s.s doors till the reflection that every second was making an encounter with the Allingham woman more certain drove her out to the street; a move which she found immediate reason to repent. Only a few feet away Bellamy stood with an affectionate arm round the shoulder of the door-porter, greatly to the seeming embarra.s.sment of that monumental personage and the amus.e.m.e.nt of the street. A knot of grinning bystanders had already begun to gather.

Bel's derby was perilously perched, his overcoat, donned in haste, was poorly settled on his shoulders, though he had contrived to worry two b.u.t.tons through the wrong b.u.t.tonholes, and he was explaining, unconsciously to everybody within a wide radius, the personal service he required in return for the ten-dollar bill which he was waving beneath the porter's nose.

"Now, lishn, Jim.... Do' mind my callin' you Jim, do you, ol' scout?...

Get thish straight: M'wife's here t'night 'nd I don' want her know I wash here, shee? If she don' know I wash here, she's got nothin' on me, nothin' 'tall, shee? So you don' know me, you never heard of me, shee?"

"Yes, Mr. Druce."

"'Caush it's this way: if she's got nothin' on me, I'm all right, 'nd I got somethin' on her. Believe me, Jim, I got good 'nd plenty on her t'night. She's here with man I know and don' like, man I got no ush for at all--shee?--no ush whatever. Ain't that limit, jush like woman?

Insist you gotta walk chalk-mark, but minute your back'sh turned, what they do? Go off on private lil parties all their own, that'sh sort of thing they do!..."

Panting and sick with mortification, Lucinda turned from the sound of that babbling voice of a fool--and heard her own name p.r.o.nounced.

"The car is here, Mrs. Druce."

In a wild stare she identified the face of her chauffeur, saw that he understood the situation and was anxious to be helpful.

"Wait," she quavered.