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Updated: May 1, 2025
I recalled my first thrills of anticipation amidst the glowing, excited youth of the resting dancers at the Hall. We had been impatient for further expression. The dragging departure of the Sturtons had been an unbearable check upon the exuberance of our desires. In my thought of the scene I could see the unspent spirit of our vitality streaming up in a fierce fount of energy.
"I had a kind of premonition that it was going to, as soon as it began," she was saying. Gordon Hughes was telling the old story of the sentry who had saved his life by a similar counting of the strokes of midnight. And at the back of my mind my dæmon was still thrusting out little spurts of enthralling allegory. The Sturtons and Jervaises had been driven in from the open.
She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one. I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play had become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off through the baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and hostess were moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.
The stimulus of the fragrant night-stock had been excluded. Miss Tattersall pretended not to yawn. We all pretended that we did not feel a craving to yawn. The chatter rose and fell spasmodically in short devitalised bursts of polite effort. I looked round for Brenda, but could not see her anywhere. "Won't you come back into the drawing-room?" Mrs. Jervaise was saying to the Sturtons.
And he came down to the central cluster of faintly irritated Sturtons and Jervaises, with an evident hesitation that marked the gravity of his message. Every one was watching that group under the electric-lighted chandelier it was posed to hold the stage but I fancy that most of the audience were solely interested in getting rid of the unhappy Sturtons.
The Jervaises were uncomfortably warm in their reassurances. They felt, no doubt, the growing impatience of all their other visitors pressing forward with the reminder that if the Sturtons' cab did not come at once, there would be no more dancing. Half-way up the stairs little Nora Bailey's high laughing voice was embroidering her statement with regard to the extra stroke of the stable-clock.
"All the same," I went on boldly, "it looks horribly suspicious." "What does?" I began to lose patience with him. "I'm not suggesting that the Sturtons' man from the Royal Oak has been murdered," I said. He weighed that remark as if it might cover a snare, before he scored a triumph of allusiveness by replying, "Fellow called Carter. He's got a blue nose."
It was as if their single over-soul had sighed its thankfulness and had then tried to cover the solecism. Their relief was short-lived. Mrs. Jervaise "couldn't think" of the Sturtons walking. They must have the motor. She insisted. Really nothing at all. Their chauffeur was sure to be up, still.
Any reference to the dance, to the Sturtons, the place, the weather, suddenly assumed in my mind the appearance of a subtle approach to the subject I most wished to avoid. If I was, indeed, regarded in that house as a spy in league with the enemy, the most innocent remark might be construed into an attempt to obtain evidence.
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