“He was an officer in the battalion I went over with,” MacRae replied.  “I went over in the ranks, you see.  So I couldn’t very well know him.  And I never met him after I transferred to the air service.”

“I just wondered,” Nelly went on.  “I know Norman rather well.  It has been whispered about that he pulled every string to keep away from the front,—­that all he has done over there is to hold down cushy jobs in England.  Did you ever hear any such talk?”

“We were too busy to gossip about the boys at home, except to envy them.”  MacRae evaded direct reply, and Nelly did not follow it up.

“I see his sister over there.  Betty is a dear girl.  That’s she talking to Stubby.  Come over and meet her.  They’ve been up on their island for a long time, while the flu raged.”

MacRae couldn’t very well avoid it without seeming rude or making an explanation which he did not intend to make to any one.  His grudge against the Gower clan was focused on Horace Gower.  His feeling had not abated a jot.  But it was a personal matter, something to remain locked in his own breast.  So he perforce went with Nelly Abbott and was duly presented to Miss Elizabeth Gower.  And he had the next dance with her, also for convention’s sake.

While they stood chatting a moment, the four of them, Stubby said to MacRae: 

“Who are you with, Jack?”

“The Robbin-Steeles.”

“If I don’t get a chance to talk to you again, come out to the house to-morrow,” Stubby said.  “The mater said so, and I want to talk to you about something.”

The music began and MacRae and Betty Gower slid away in the one-step, that most conversational of dances.  But Jack couldn’t find himself chatty with Betty Gower.  She was graceful and clear-eyed, a vigorously healthy girl with a touch of color in her cheeks that came out of Nature’s rouge pot.  But MacRae was subtly conscious of a stiffness between them.

“After all,” Betty said abruptly, when they had circled half the room, “it was worth fighting for, don’t you really think?”

For a second MacRae looked down at her, puzzled.  Then he remembered.

“Good Heavens!” he said, “is that still bothering you?  Do you take everything a fellow says so seriously as that?”

“No.  It wasn’t so much what you said as the way you said it,” she replied.  “You were uncompromisingly hostile that day, for some reason.  Have you acquired a more equable outlook since?”

“I’m trying,” he answered.

“You need coaching in the art of looking on the bright side of things,” she smiled.

“Such as clusters of frosted lights, cut glass, diamonds, silk dresses and ropes of pearls,” he drawled.  “Would you care to take on the coaching job, Miss Gower?”

“I might be persuaded.”  She looked him frankly in the eyes.