“There was only one dance I enjoyed better than the one with Mrs. Rufus Gray.”  He lowered his tone so that she could hear.  “Since you have commended me for doing as your brother bade me—­be all things to all partners—­will you give me my reward by letting me tell you that I shall never hear ‘Roses Red’ again without thinking of the most perfect dance I ever had?”

“That sounds like an appropriate farewell from the cotillion leader,” said Roberta.  Then instantly she knew that in her haste to cover a very girlish sense of pleasure in the thing he had said she herself had said an unkind one.  She knew it as a slow red came into her guest’s handsome face and his eyes darkened.  Before he could speak—­though, indeed, he did not seem in haste to speak—­she added, putting out her hand impulsively: 

“Forgive me; I didn’t mean it.  You have been lovely to every one to-night, and I have appreciated it.  I am wrong; I think you are much more—­and have in you far more—­than—­as if you were only—­the thing I said.”

He made no immediate reply, though he took the hand she gave him.  He continued to look at her for so long that her own eyes fell.  When he did speak it was in a low, odd tone which she could not quite understand.

“Miss Gray,” said he, “if you want to cut a man to the quick, insist on thinking him that which he has never had any love for being, and which he has grown to detest the thought of.  But perhaps it’s a salutary sort of surgery, for—­by the powers! if I can’t make you think differently of me it won’t be for lack of will.  So—­thank you for being hard on me, thank you for everything.  Good-night!”

As she looked at him march away with his head up, her hand was aching with the force of the almost brutally hard grip he had given it with that last speech.  Her final glimpse of him showed him with a tinge of the angry red still lingering on his cheek, and a peculiar set to his finely cut mouth which she had never noticed there before.  But, in spite of this, anything more courtly than his leave-taking of her mother and her Aunt Ruth she had never seen from one of the young men of the day.

CHAPTER IX

MR. KENDRICK ENTERTAINS

On their way downstairs, Matthew Kendrick and his grandson, escorted by Louis Gray, encountered a small company of people apparently just arrived from a train.  Louis stopped for a moment to greet them, turned them over to his brother Stephen, whom he signalled from a stair-landing above, and went on down to the entrance-hall with the Kendricks.

“Too bad they’re late for the party,” he observed.  “They had written they couldn’t come, I believe.  Mother will have to do a bit of figuring to dispose of them.  But the more the merrier under this roof, every time.”

“It’s rather late to be putting people up for the night,” Richard observed.  “Your mother will be sending some of them to a hotel, I imagine.  Couldn’t we”—­he glanced at his grandfather—­“have the pleasure of taking them in our car? or of sending it back for them, if there are too many?”