Quite obviously Len Haswell, whose laugh ordinarily rang like a fog-horn over the chorus of conversation, would just now have preferred being elsewhere.  When their customary joviality left those gray eyes, the man’s immensity took on something of an ogre’s power.  He tinkled the ice in his high-ball glass—­a process to which he had devoted himself with unaccustomed repetition this evening and, instead of mellowing into conviviality under his libations, his eyes narrowed a little and the small frowning line between his brows deepened.

“The Big Fellow’s having a grouch, eh, what?  He’s getting a bit squiffy, if you ask me,” suggested Norvil Thayre to the group centered where the punch-bowl was being administered.  Norvil Thayre was not having a grouch.  If he had ever had a grouch he had kept his secret well.  An American by adoption, he was still aggressively British in speech, dress and eccentricity.

Norvil Thayre’s chest was always thrust out as cheerily and confidently as a cock-robin’s, and his step was as elastic as though he had just come, freshly galvanized, from some electric source of exuberant energy.  His clothing escaped the extremes of fashion by the narrowest margin of good taste, and his mustache ends bristled up toward the laughing wrinkles about his wide-awake eyes like exclamation points of alertness.

“And,” went on Mr. Thayre amiably, “if he hungers for solitude I’m the last chap in the world to intrude on his meditations.  I jolly well know myself what it means to hang precariously on the fringe of plutocracy with only a beastly whisper of an income—­and by the Lord Harry I’m a bachelor.”  Several auditors nodded their sympathetic understanding, but a tall youth with viking blond hair and vacant eyes which seemed to proclaim, “I am looking, but I see not,” was less judicious.  He lounged over and dropped into a chair at Haswell’s side.

“That singularly frightful little ass, Larry Kirk, is going to cheer him up now,” smiled Thayre.  “Trust him to make himself a nuisance.”

“Not dancing much this evening, Len?” suggested Kirk by way of opening the conversation with the silent one.

“No.”  The reply was curt.

“I’ve been wanting to dance with your wife,” persisted the other, “but she’s as illusive as a wraith.”

This time Haswell did not vouchsafe even a monosyllable in reply, and the tactless Kirk assumed the double burden of the conversation.

“I call it rough treatment when the two truly beautiful women in society come to a dance and proceed, to all intents and purposes, to evaporate.  Miss Burton, too, seems to have been converted into thin air.  What’s the use of struggling to keep up with new steps?”

Len Haswell rose stiffly from his chair, and, tossing his cigar through the open window, stalked silently from the room.

The blond young man glanced uncomprehendingly after him, and Thayre’s laugh broke in a booming peal.