“Oh, don’t think that I am standing aside out of pity,” Joan answered her.  “To-morrow I shall be impossible as a wife for Harry Luttrell.”  The words fell upon ears which did not hear.  It would not have mattered if Stella had heard.  Since Harry Luttrell was that night asking Joan to marry him, the hopes upon which she had so long been building, which Jenny Prask had done so much to nurse and encourage, withered and crumbled in an instant.

“I must go back and dance,” said Joan with a shiver.

She left Stella Croyle standing in the room like one possessed with visions of terrible things.  Her tragic face and moving lips were to haunt Joan for many a month afterwards.  She went out by the window and ran down the drive to the spot where she had left Miranda’s car half-way between the lodge and the house.  The gates had been set open that night against the return of the party from Harrel.  Joan drove back again under the great over-arching trees of the road.  It was just ten o’clock when she slipped into the ball-room and was claimed by a neighbour for a dance.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE RANK AND FILE

Martin Hillyard crammed a year’s enjoyment into the early hours of that night.  He danced a great deal and had supper a good many times; and even the girl who had passed the season of 1914 in London and said languidly, “Tell me more,” before he had opened his mouth, failed to ruffle his enjoyment.

“If I did, you would scream for your mother,” he replied, “and I should be turned out of the house and Sir Chichester would lose his position in the county.  No, I’ll tell you less.  That means we’ll go and have some supper.”

He led a subdued maiden into the supper-room and from that moment his enjoyment began to wane.  For, at a little table near to hand, sat Joan Whitworth and Harry Luttrell, and it was clear to him from the distress upon their faces that their smooth courtship had encountered its obstacles.  A spot of anger, indeed, seemed to burn in Joan’s cheeks.  They hardly spoke at all.

Half an hour later, he came face to face with Joan in a corridor.

“I have been looking for you for a long while,” she cried in a quick, agitated voice.  “Are you free for this dance?”

“Yes.”

Martin Hillyard lied without compunction.

“Then will you take me into the garden?”

He found a couple of chairs in a corner of the terrace out of the hearing of the rest.

“We shall be quiet here,” he said.  He hoped that she would disclose the difficulty which had risen between herself and Harry, and seek his counsel as Harry’s friend.  It might be one of the little trifling discords which love magnifies until they blot out the skies and drape the earth in temporary mourning.  But Joan began at once nervously upon a different topic.

“You made a charge against Mario Escobar the other day.  I did not believe it.  But you spoke the truth.  I know that now.”