Several men in evening-dress and fur coats surrounded him, and he knew them all.  The face of Norvil Thayre was laughing into his, and he recognized that an evening well started had painted its flush on the cheeks of each of them.

“My word, Burton!” laughed the Englishman.  “I haven’t seen you since the war of the Roses.  How goes it, lad?” Then, even in his heightened gaiety of mood, Thayre recognized the want and distress which had left their impress and pallor on this face, and his eyes sobered.  With the other rules of the season he felt that forgetfulness of the past accorded, so he hastened to add, “You know these fellows.  Fall in and hike along with us.  We have a table reserved at Kenley’s and it’s close to the platform.  I dare say we sha’n’t miss many tricks.”

A deep embarrassment flooded the face of the outcast.  He, who had once numbered these men among his associates, felt sensitively the pinched poverty of his present condition and its contrast with their Persian-lamb collars, otter-lined coats and their white shirt fronts of evening-dress.

“Thank you,” he said gravely, “I’m afraid I can’t.  Your party is made up and—­and—­”

But as he stammered to a pause Thayre slapped him heartily on the back, and the others, with voices of more advanced inebriety, made it a chorus of insistence.

“’Twill do you no harm, my lad,” declared the Englishman. “’A little nonsense now and then—­’ You know the old saw.  A bite of mixed grill and a beaker of bubbles will buck you up, no end.”

The musician hesitated, deeply tempted.  To sit at table with white damask and clear glass, and once more to eat such things as they serve at Kenley’s!  The idea could not be lightly dismissed.  Besides he felt suddenly giddy and weak.  He frequently felt so these days, and if he accepted he could rest quietly until the vertigo passed.

“I say—­of course,” Thayre leaned forward and explained in a lowered voice, “you go as my guest.  I’m giving the party tonight.”

Ten minutes later, retrieved from the street, Paul Burton sat near the edge of the cabaret platform in a cafe where every table had been reserved long in advance, and from whose doors many eager applicants were being turned away.

Nearby, too, was the space reserved for dancing, and as Paul drank his first glass of champagne the bubbles rose and raced merrily through his thin blood, lifting him out of his squalid reality into an echo world of irresponsibility.  The crowds on the floor were swirling to a delirious dance tune while above their heads shot up the white arms of women and the black arms of men, to keep dozens of multi-colored toy balloons afloat over them.

Like glass balls on a fountain-spray, red and blue and purple spheres drifted up and down, and confetti showered, and dancers snatched paper caps from the heads of strangers, and crowned themselves therewith.

Wilder groups danced, not in pairs, but in trios and quartettes with arms locked around shoulders—­and it wanted a half-hour of the changing year.