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Seldom, if ever, has a more strangely assorted party met at dinner than that which gathered in the Hotel Kursaal under the social wing of Mrs. de la Vere. Her husband, while being coached in essentials, was the first to discover its incongruities. "Where Miss Wynton is concerned, you are warned off," his wife told him dryly. "You must console yourself with Mrs. Badminton-Smythe.
Badminton-Smythe; for Reginald, tiring of the rôle thrust on him by his wife, had gone to play bridge. It was his clear intent to take Helen from her chaperon. "It is still snowing, though not so heavily," he said. "Come on the veranda, and look at the landscape. The lake is a pool of ink in the middle of a white table cloth."
"If she only knew how sick I was of all this jolly rot, p'r'aps we'd run better in double harness." So it came to pass, when the company assembled in the great dining room, that Bower sat on Mrs. de la Vere's left, and Spencer on her right. Beyond them, respectively, were Lulu Badminton-Smythe and her husband, and between these latter were de la Vere and Helen.
In fact, they were the liveliest party in the room. Many an eye was drawn by a merriment that offered such striking contrast to the dramatic episode in the outer hall. "The one person missing from that crowd is the stage lady," was Miss Gladys Wragg's caustic comment, when Badminton-Smythe evoked a fresh outburst by protesting that he forgot to eat his fish owing to Spencer's beastly funny yarn.
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