‘You shall have it in a moment,’ Mrs. Manning called back. Sighing, she turned to her friend.

‘We must postpone our little séance.’

Five days had gone by—it was the evening of the twenty-seventh, the night of the ball. Marion went up to her room to rest. Dinner was at half-past eight, so she had nearly two hours’ respite. She lay down on the bed and turned out all the lights except the one near her head. She felt very tired. She had talked so much during the past few days that even her thoughts had become articulate; they would not stay in her mind; they rose automatically to her lips, or it seemed to her that they did. ‘I am glad I did not tell Jenny,’ she soliloquised; ‘it would only have made her think worse of me, and done no good. What a wretched business.’ She extinguished the light, but the gramophone within her went on more persistently than ever. It was a familiar record; she knew every word of it: it might have been called The Witness for the Defence. ‘He had no reason to take me so seriously,’ announced the machine in self-excusatory accents. ‘I only wanted to amuse him. It was Hugh Travers who introduced us: he knows what I am like; he must have told Harry; men always talk these things over among themselves. Hugh had a grievance against me, too, once; but he got over it; I have never known a man who didn’t.’ For a moment Marion’s thoughts broke free from their bondage to the turning wheel and hovered over her past life. Yes, more or less, they had all got over it. ‘I never made him any promise.’ pursued the record, inexorably taking up its tale: ‘what right had he to think he could coerce me? Hugh ought not to have let us meet, knowing the kind of man he was—and—and the kind of woman I was. I was very fond of him, of course; but he would have been so exacting, he was so exacting. All the same,’ continued the record—sliding a moment into the major key only to relapse into the minor—‘left to myself I could have managed it all right, as I always have. It was pure bad luck that he found me that night with the other Harry. That was a dreadful affair.’ At this point the record, as always, wobbled and scratched: Marion had to improvise something less painful to bridge over the gap. Her thoughts flew to the other Harry and dwelt on him tenderly; he would never have made a scene if he could have helped it; he had been so sweet to her afterwards. ‘It was just bad luck,’ the record resumed; ‘I didn’t want to blast his happiness and wreck his life, or whatever he says I did.’

What had he actually said? There was an ominous movement in Marion’s mind. The mechanism was being wound up, was going through the whole dreary performance again. Anything rather than that! She turned on the light, jumped off the bed, and searched among her letters. The moment she had it in her hand, she realized that she knew it by heart.

Marion’s eyes slid from the letter to the chair beside her where lay mask and domino, ready to put on. She did not feel the irony of their presence; she did not think about them; she was experiencing an immense relief—a relief that always came after reading Harry’s letter. When she thought about it it appalled her; when she read it it seemed much less hostile, flattering almost; a testimonial from a wounded and disappointed but still adoring man. She lay down again, and in a moment was asleep.

Soon after ten o’clock the gentlemen followed the ladies into the long drawing-room; it looked unfamiliar even to Jack Manning, stripped of furniture except for a thin lining of gilt chairs. So far everything had gone off splendidly; dinner, augmented by the presence of half a dozen neighbours, had been a great success; but now everyone, including the host and hostess, was a little uncertain what to do next. The zero hour was approaching; the cotillon was supposed to start at eleven and go on till twelve, when the serious dancing would begin; but guests motoring from a distance might arrive at any time. It would spoil the fun of the thing to let the masked and the unmasked meet before the cotillon started; but how could they be kept apart? To preserve the illusion of secrecy Mrs. Manning had asked them to announce themselves at the head of the staircase, in tones sufficiently discreet to be heard by her alone. Knowing how fallible are human plans, she had left in the cloakroom a small supply of masks for those men who, she knew, would forget to bring them. She thought her arrangements were proof against mischance, but she was by no means sure; and as she looked about the room and saw the members of the dinner-party stealing furtive glances at the clock, or plunging into frantic and short-lived conversations, she began to share their uneasiness.

‘I think,’ she said, after one or two unsuccessful efforts to gain the ear of the company, ‘I think you had all better go and disguise yourselves, before anyone comes and finds you in your natural state.’ The guests tittered nervously at this pleasantry, then with signs of relief upon their faces they began to file out, some by one door, some by the other, according as the direction of their own rooms took them. The long gallery (as it was sometimes magniloquently described) stood empty and expectant.

‘There,’ breathed Mrs. Manning, ‘would you have recognized that parlour bandit as Sir Joseph Dickinson?’

‘No,’ said her husband, ‘I wouldn’t have believed a mask and a domino could make such a difference. Except for a few of the men, I hardly recognized anyone.’

‘You’re like Marion; she told me she often cuts her best friends in the street.’

‘I dare say that’s a gift she’s grateful for.’

‘Jack! You really mustn’t. Didn’t she look lovely to-night! What a pity she has to wear a mask, even for an hour!’

Her husband grunted.

‘I told Colin Chillingworth she was to be here: you know he’s always wanted to see her. He is such a nice old man, so considerate—the manners of the older generation.’

‘Why, because he wants to see Marion?’

‘No, idiot! But he had asked me if he might bring a guest——’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t remember the man’s name, but he has a bilious attack or something, and can’t come, and Colin apologized profusely for not letting us know: his telephone is out of order, he said.’

‘Very civil of him. How many are we then, all told?’

‘Seventy-eight; we should have been seventy-nine.’

‘Anyone else to come?’

‘I’ll just ask Jackson.’

The butler was standing half-way down the stairs. He confirmed Mrs. Manning’s estimate. ‘That’s right, Madam; there were twenty-two at dinner and fifty-six have come in since.’

‘Good staff-work,’ said her husband. ‘Now we must dash off and put on our little masks.’

They were hurrying away when Mrs. Manning called over her shoulder: ‘You’ll see that the fires are kept up, Jackson?’

‘Oh, yes, Madam,’ he replied. ‘It’s very warm in there.’