“It will take her just twenty-four hours,” said the girl stoutly.  “He used to terrify me, Mrs. Friend, when I was a little thing ...  May I have some tea, please?  When he came to see us, I always knew before he had been ten minutes in the room that my hair was coming down, or my shoes were untied, or something dreadful was the matter with me.  I can’t imagine how we shall get on, now that he is my guardian.  I shall put him in a temper twenty times a day.”

“Ah, but the satisfactory thing now is that you will have to put up with my remarks.  I have a legal right now to say what I like.”

“H’m,” said Helena, demurring, “if there are legal rights nowadays.”

“There, Mrs. Friend—­you hear?” said Lord Buntingford, toying with his cigarette, in the depths of a big chair, and watching his ward with eyes of evident enjoyment.  “You’ve got a Bolshevist to look after—­a real anarchist.  I’m sorry for you.”

“That’s another of his peculiarities!” said the girl coolly, “queering the pitch before one begins.  You know you might like me!—­some people do—­but he’ll never let you.”  And, bending forward, with her cup in both hands, and her radiant eyes peering over the edge of it, she threw a most seductive look at her new chaperon.  The look seemed to say, “I’ve been taking stock of you, and—­well!—­I think I shan’t mind you.”

Anyway, Mrs. Friend took it as a feeler and a friendly one.  She stammered something in reply, and then sat silent while guardian and ward plunged into a war of chaff in which first the ward, but ultimately the guardian, got the better.  Lord Buntingford had more resource and could hold out longer, so that at last Helena rose impatiently: 

“I don’t feel that I have been at all prettily welcomed—­have I, Mrs. Friend?  Lord Buntingford never allows one a single good mark.  He says I have been idle all the winter since the Armistice.  I haven’t.  I’ve worked like a nigger!”

“How many dances a week, Helena?—­and how many boys?” Helena first made a face, and then laughed out.

“As many dances—­of course—­as one could stuff in—­without taxis.  I could walk down most of the boys.  But Hampstead, Chelsea, and Curzon Street, all in one night, and only one bus between them—­that did sometimes do for me.”

“When did you set up this craze?”

“Just about Christmas—­I hadn’t been to a dance for a year.  I had been slaving at canteen work all day”—­she turned to Mrs. Friend—­“and doing chauffeur by night—­you know—­fetching wounded soldiers from railway stations.  And then somebody asked me to a dance, and I went.  And next morning I just made up my mind that everything else in the world was rot, and I would go to a dance every night.  So I chucked the canteen and I chucked a good deal of the driving—­except by day—­and I just dance—­and dance!”

Suddenly she began to whistle a popular waltz—­and the next minute the two elder people found themselves watching open-mouthed the whirling figure of Miss Helena Pitstone, as, singing to herself, and absorbed apparently in some new and complicated steps, she danced down the whole length of the drawing-room and back again.  Then out of breath, with a curtsey and a laugh, she laid a sudden hand on Mrs. Friend’s arm.