‘Are they?’ She spoke naively, with a girlish inflection and a girlish gesture.

‘Well, of course!’ He smiled gravely, and yet humorously.  And his eyes said:  ‘What a charming simple thing you are!’ And she liked to think of his superiority over her in experience, knowledge, imperturbability, breadth of view, and all those kindred qualities which women give to the men they admire.

They could not talk further on the subject.

‘By the by, how’s your foot?’ he inquired.

‘My foot?’

‘Yes.  You hurt it last night, didn’t you, after I’d gone?’

She had completely forgotten the trifling fiction, until it thus rather startlingly reappeared on his lips.  She might easily have let it die naturally, had she chosen; but she could not choose.  She had a whim to kill it violently, romantically.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t hurt it.’

‘It was your husband was telling me.’

She went on joyously and fearfully:  ’Some one asked me to dance, after—­after the Blue Danube.  And I didn’t want to; I couldn’t.  And so I said I had hurt my foot.  It was just one of those things that one says, you know!’

He was embarrassed; he had no remark ready.  But to preserve appearances he lowered the corners of his lips and glanced at the copper tea-kettle through half-closed eyes, feigning to suppress a private amusement.  She was quite aware, however, that she had embarrassed him.  And just as, a minute earlier, she had liked him for his lordly, masculine, philosophic superiority, so now she liked him for that youthful embarrassment.  She felt that all men were equally child-like to women, and that the most adorable were the most child-like.  ’How little you understand, after all!’ she thought.  ’Poor boy, I unlatched the door, and you dared not push it open!  You were afraid of committing an indiscretion.  But I will guide and protect you, and protect us both.’

This was the woman who, half an hour ago, had been exulting in the adequacy of her common sense.  Innocent and enchanting creature, with the rashness of innocence!

‘I guess I couldn’t dance again after the Blue Danube, either,’ he said at length, boldly.

She made no answer; perhaps she was a little intimidated; but she looked at him with eyes and lips full of latent vivacity.

‘That was why I left,’ he finished firmly.  There was in his tone a hint of that engaging and piquant antagonism which springs up between lovers and dies away; he had the air of telling her that since she had invited a confession she was welcome to it.

She retreated, still admiring, and said evenly that the ball had been a great success.

Soon afterwards Ethel and Milly unexpectedly entered the room.  They had put on the formal aspect of dejection which they deemed proper for them, but on perceiving that their elders were talking quite naturally, they at once abandoned constraint and became natural too.  From the sight of their unaffected pleasure in seeing Arthur Twemlow again, Leonora drew further sustenance for her mood of serene content.