“Well, we did manage somehow, didn’t we?”

They gazed at the figures wheeling past them, blankly unresponsive to casual stares and smiles.  They seemed to hear the rotten flood-gates, shut so long ago, creak on their rusty hinges.

“Heard anything of the Urquharts lately?”

“Yes.  Alice was married the other day—­to a widower with fourteen children.  She has not been very happy at home, I fear, with Harold’s wife.  Harold has the place now, you know.  Jim gave it up to him when he married.”

“When who married?”

“Harold.”

“What’s Jim doing?”

“He is my manager at Redford.”

Mr Dalzell smiled darkly.  “He likes that, I suppose?”

“I don’t know whether he likes it or not, I’m sure, but I do.  I know that everything’s right when he is there.”

“Married?” “Lawks, no!  The most confirmed old bachelor on the face of the earth.”

They fell silent again, still gazing into the room.  Deb lay back and fanned herself; Claud leaned forward and nursed his knee.  He ought now to have asked news of her sisters, but he avoided mentioning any of them.

“Been back lately, Deb?”

“Not for years, I am ashamed to say.”

“Anybody living at Redford?”

“Miss Keene and a few servants only.  Too bad, isn’t it?  Oh, I must go soon and see the old place.  But this European life—­somehow, the longer you live it the less you feel you can live any other.”

“I used to feel that.  But now—­one gets awfully tired of things—­”

“Oh, I don’t!”

“But then you keep so horribly young, don’t you know.”

He turned and looked at her.  She flushed up like a girl.

“Thank you.  That’s a very pleasing compliment, although I know you cannot mean it.”

“I’d like not to mean it.  I’d like to have found you as old as I am myself.”

“How cruel of you!  Not that you are such a Methuselah as you would try to make out—­”

“There are not five years between us,” he broke in sharply.

“I know.”

Back went memory in a flash to a succession of childish birthdays, their love-tokens and festive celebrations.  His was in November, and his “party” was usually a picnic.  Hers was in May, and was “kept” in the house, with big fires and a tea-table crowned with a three-tiered iced cake, and blind-man’s-buff and turn-the-trencher in the evening.  She recalled wild contests with an imperious little boy, who could never conquer her except by stooping to it; and the self-conscious silliness of their behaviour to each other when they grew from children into boy and girl.

“Not much fun in birthdays now, Deb.”  He seemed to comment on her thoughts.

“Oh, well!” she sighed vaguely.

And at that instant the music stopped.  Someone gave the signal to retire from the ball-room, bedwards.  They were parted by the crowd that gathered about them when the dancing ceased, and he did not find her again even to say good-night.