Part 19

"I haven't got any home."

"My home is yours, till you marry."

"Or you do."

"Don't talk nonsense." (He was probably going to say "Tommy-rot" but considered such striking words unfit for the ear of a debutante. This was my debut, I suppose? My very first ball.)

"Then tell me what you were unprepared for in me."

"I was prepared for it at first, before I saw you. But----"

"What?"

"Well, if you will have it, for your flirting."

Suddenly I felt impish, and said, innocently, that I supposed it was what girls came on board men-o'-war to do, so I had only done my best to please. By this time we'd stopped dancing, and were sitting down. I'd forgotten Dick Burden.

"It all depends upon the point of view," he answered, with rather a disgusted air.

"My point of view is," said I, gravely, "that soldiers as well as sailors should approve of flirting, because flirtation is a warlike act; a short incursion into the enemy's country, with the full intention of getting back untouched."

"Ah, but what of the enemy?" suggested the Dragon.

"He can always take care of himself on such incursions."

"So that's the theory? And at nineteen you have enlisted in that army?"

"What army?"

"The great army of flirts."

I couldn't keep it up any longer, for I had really started in to explain, not to joke. And you know, dear, that flirting as a profession wouldn't be in my line at all.

"Do I look like a flirt?" I asked.

"No. You don't," said he. "And I was beginning to hope----"

"Please go on hoping, then," I said. "Because I didn't want to behave badly. If I did, it was because I don't quite know the game yet. And I wanted to tell you that I didn't really mean to be silly and schoolgirlish, and disgrace you and Mrs. Norton."

Then it was his turn to apologize, and he did it thoroughly. He said that I hadn't been silly, and so far from disgracing him, he was proud of me--"proud of his ward." It was only that I seemed so much more womanly and companionable than he'd expected, that he couldn't bear to see in me, or think he saw, any likeness whatever to inferior types of woman. Whereupon I had the impertinence to ask why he'd expected me to be inferior; but the only explanation I could get him to make was that he didn't know much about girls. Which he had remarked before.

We'd sat out two dances before we--I mean I--knew it; and nobody had dared to come near us, because a middy can't very well snatch a partner out of a celebrity's pocket. And Dick, too, though he seems to have the courage of most of his convictions, drew the line at that. But suddenly I did remember. I smiled at a hovering laddie with the most smoothly polished hair you ever saw, just like a black helmet; and when the laddie had swung me away in the Merry Widow waltz Sir Lionel went back to Mrs. Senter. Rather an appropriate air for her to dance to, I thought. I do pray I'm not getting kitten-catty? Anyhow, I'm not in my second kittenhood!

You will be wondering by this time why I'm sorry we stayed at Southsea, when it was all for me, and I seem to have been having the "time of my life." But I'm coming to the part you want to know about.

I thought perhaps Dick Burden would be vexed at my going off with Sir Lionel, under his nose, just as he was ready to say "my dance." However, he walked up to me as if nothing had happened, when it was time for the second, so I didn't apologize. I thought it best to let sleeping partners lie.

We danced a little, but Dick, who is one-and-twenty, doesn't waltz half as well as Sir Lionel, who is forty; and he saw that I thought so. Presently he asked if I'd rather sit out the rest, and I answered, yes; so he said he would tell me the things he had to say. He found a quiet place, which must have looked as if deliberately selected for a desperate flirtation; and then he didn't do much beating about the bush. He just told me that he knew everything. He'd partly "detected" it, and partly found out by chance; but of course he made the most of the detecting bit.

Don't be frightened and get a palpitation at the news, dearest; it isn't worth it. There's going to be no flare-up. Of course, if I were the heroine of a really nice melodrama, in such a scene as Dick and I went through, I should have been accompanied by slow music, with lime-light every time I turned my head, which would have heartened me up very much; while Dick would have had villain music--plink, plink, plunk! But I did as well as I could without an accompaniment, and I think, on the whole, managed the business very well.

You see, I had to think of Ellaline. I dared not let her out of my mind for a single instant, for if I should fail her now, at the crucial time, it would be my fault if her love story burst and went up the spout. If I'd stopped thinking of her, and saying in my mind while Dick talked, "I must save Ellaline, no matter what happens to me!" I should certainly have boxed his ears and told him to go to limbo.

He began by telling me that he'd met a friend of mine, a Miss Bennett--Kathy Bennett. Oh, mother, just for a minute my heart beat under my pretty frock like a bird caught in a child's hand! You remember my writing you what a friendship Ellaline and Kathy struck up, before Kathy left school to go back to England, and how she sent Ellaline cuttings from the London Radical papers about Sir Lionel Pendragon in Bengal? I do think it's almost ungentlemanly of so many coincidences to happen in connection with what I'm trying to do for Ellaline. But Kathy's such a lump, it's too great a compliment to call her a coincidence. Anyhow, Dick met her in town, at a tea party (a "bun worry," he called it) where he went with his dear Aunt Gwen; and when Kathy mentioned being at school at Madame de Maluet's, he asked if she knew Miss Lethbridge. She said of course she did, and she thought Ellaline was a "very naughty little thing" not to write or come and see her. She had read in the papers about the arrival of Sir Lionel with his sister and ward, you see.