Her thought remained unuttered.  Roy was patently not attending.  Miss Arden and the ‘R.E. boy’ had just entered the Hall.

“Don’t let me keep you,” she added sweetly.  “It’s evident she’s the next!”

Roy collected himself with a jerk.  “You’re wiser than I am!  I’ve not asked her yet.”

“Then you can save yourself the trouble and go on dancing with me!  She’s always booked up ahead——­”

Her blue eyes challenged him laughingly; but he caught the undernote of rivalry.  For half a second the scales hung even between courtesy and inclination; then, from the tail of his eye, he saw Hayes bearing down upon the other pair.  That decided him.  He had conceived an unreasoning dislike of Talbot Hayes.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said politely.  “But—­I sent word I was coming in for the dancing; and——­”

“Oh, go along then and get your fingers burnt, as you deserve.  But never say I didn’t try and save them!”

Roy laughed.  “They aren’t in any danger, thanks very much!”

Just as he reached Miss Arden, the R.E. boy left her, and Lance, forsaking his pillar, strolled casually to her side.

She greeted Roy with a faint lift of her brows.

“Was I unspeakable——?  I apologise,” he said impulsively; and her smile absolved him.

“You were wiser than you knew.  You escaped an infliction.  It was insufferably dull.  We all smiled and smiled, till there were ’miles and miles of smiles’; and we were all bored to extinction!  Ask Major Desmond!”

She acknowledged his presence with a sidelong glance.  He returned it with a quick look that told Roy he had been touched on the raw.

“As I spent most of the time talking to you—­and as you’ve just recorded your sensations, I’d rather be excused,” he said with a touch of stiffness.  “Your innings, I suppose, old man?” And, with a friendly nod, he moved away.

Roy, watching him go, felt almost angry with the girl, and impetuously spoke his thought.

“Poor old Desmond!  What did you give him a knock for? He couldn’t be dull, if he tried.”

“N-no,” she agreed, without removing her eyes from his retreating figure.  “But sometimes—­he can be aggressive.”

“I’ve never noticed it.”

“How long have you known him?”

“A trifle of fifteen years.”

“Quite a romantic friendship?”

Roy nodded.  He did not choose to discuss his feeling for Lance with this cool, compelling young woman.  Yet her very coolness goaded him to add:  “I suppose men see more clearly than women that—­he’s one in a thousand.”

“I’m—­not so sure——­”

“Yet you snub him as if he was a tin-pot ‘sub.’”

His resentment would out; but the smile in her eyes disarmed him.

“Was it as bad as that?  What a pair you are!  Don’t worry.  We know each other’s little ways by now.”

It was scarcely convincing; but Lance would not thank him for interfering; and the band had struck up.  No sign of a partner.  It seemed the luck was ‘in’.