Chapter XI: Gay Disposes

The Professor, Gay said, was always late. It was her solemn conviction that he would be late for his own funeral, so she considered herself lucky to get to the Ffolliott's dance at all, but better late than never.

Chris and Carlton Mackrell "ran her to earth," as the former expressed it, the moment she entered the ballroom, and with other men clamouring for dances, her programme was soon full. In vain had application been made by both Chris and Carlton days in advance; Gay's rule was firm.

"I never give dances away before I get there," she said. "I regard myself as public property on such occasions, and it's a case of 'first come, first served.' It's very unfair to the men who go to dances to find a girl's card full before they have a chance, and I won't do it."

So Chris had got those supper dances, reflected Carlton Mackrell presently, but she had been liberal also to himself, and he was leading her away when the Professor suddenly exclaimed:

"What time is supper?"

"Supper! Why, you've only just got here! What are you thinking about?" exclaimed Gay.

"Supper," Frank Lawless answered mildly, with no intention of being funny.

"You haven't long had your dinner, you greedy old thing," Gay reminded him as she moved away, "but _do_ put your tie straight!"

She never had any trouble in finding the Professor, however big the crowd in which he might be. She had only to look for a tall man standing on one leg in a doorway, with his white tie under his left ear, and there he was.

On the rare occasions when he attended a dance, he possessed his soul in patience till supper-time, when he did ample justice to the good things provided, after which he sought a secluded corner, and went to sleep until such time as Gay was ready to depart.

"You haven't asked me for a dance yet, Frank," said a voice in well-pretended tones of offence behind him, and his meditations--upon supper--being thus rudely interrupted, he turned to make apologies to Lossie, who in spite of her beauty and elegance was never surrounded in a ballroom like Gay.

"Shall we have this one?" she inquired, much to the Professor's surprise and confusion. "Come along"--and before he could remonstrate, she had manœuvred him among the couples waltzing by, and he was executing his old-fashioned steps, precisely if not briskly. After one circuit of the room, accomplished with difficulty, and much bumping against indignant couples, owing to erratic steering, the Professor stopped abruptly and made a rush from the room, dragging Lossie by the arm with him. He subsided upon a couch in an exhausted condition, and producing an enormous red silk handkerchief, mopped his heated brow with it.

"You're only a bit out of practice," she said, pretending not to notice his little gasps for breath.

"Shall we have the supper ones?" she said. "I've kept them for you, and one square in the second half."

"Certainly, certainly," Frank Lawless replied, scratching his initials on her programme, "but _don't_ be late for supper. Draughty, dangerous things dances," and he shook his head disapprovingly.

Chris Hannen, who had long had his suspicions of Miss Lossie's intentions on the Professor (failing Carlton Mackrell), strolled up, intent on mischief, and Lossie, pretending to see a friend in the distance, left the two men together.

"Rather out of training, eh, Professor?" said Chris chaffingly. "Not quite clean inside, as they say. Come down to Epsom for a few days, and ride a gallop or two; do you a world of good."

The Professor shuddered.

"I have not ridden for some years," he said, "though I was considered a good horseman as a boy. Not across country," he explained. "I used to ride every day in the park."

"On a fat pony with a leading rein, no doubt," Chris thought to himself.

"I never jumped anything," the Professor went on earnestly, "but I could hold my own on the flat--"

"Of your back," Chris supplemented.

"And I never hunted--"

Chris believed him, as he waxed indignant over the cruelty done to the fox in fox-hunting.

"Why not trail a red herring across the country and let the hounds follow?" he demanded excitedly.

"If only some fox-hunters could get hold of you," cried Gay, who had come up behind them, "there wouldn't be a bit of you left!"

Chris chuckled as he led the girl away, but the eminent gentleman-jockey did not look his old, confident self that evening, and Gay put her own construction on it, as the band struck up a lively waltz.

"You're overtrained, old chap," she said, "too fine drawn--wasting again, I suppose, to ride another glorious winner, or achieve a more than usually severe purler"; but she did not, as she would once have done, smile as she said it.

"No," he replied, "I'm not overtrained, and I'm not anticipating another 'downer' just yet--not at racing anyhow," he added to himself, his face becoming serious.

After a couple of turns, to Gay's disappointment, for he was a perfect dancer, Chris steered her towards one of the doors, and led her down a corridor to a sitting-out place, which looked more secluded than it was.

Here he deposited the astonished Gay, and sat down beside her. He said nothing for a moment or two, and when he spoke, perhaps she had an inkling of what was coming.

"Gay, dear," he said, "I've got something to say to you, and I don't know how to begin."

He turned, and looked at her in her pretty white frock, and little Empire wreath of vivid green leaves, but made no effort to take her hand or touch her, for he was particularly undemonstrative, and disliked nothing more than to see a man "mauling" a woman about--a description he applied to the average man's way of making love.

Gay said nothing. She longed to be able to help him, and to save him pain if she could, for now the inkling had become a conviction, and oh! how she did wish that he wouldn't-- Free from all conceit as she was, she hated to have to give him the answer she had given so many other men.

And she was not far out, as Chris's words, very much to the point, proved.

"Will you marry me, Gay?" he said, very quietly, but with a little tremor in his clear voice. "I know it's great cheek asking you, and I can't do it in the proper way--the way they do in books, I mean," he explained.

Although very nervous, Gay could not repress a smile.

"We've known each other a considerable time now, and though, of course, while my mother was alive, the idea of marriage never occurred to me, for she made me so happy--" he paused, then blurted out:

"You must not think that I'm asking you to fill her place, or make up to me for her loss--no one could ever do that, not even you, dear little girl."

Gay, with tears in her eyes, in quick sympathy touched his hand--even if he took this for encouragement, she could not help it.

"I'm very lonely," Chris went on, "but it's because I love you for your dear self, and think the world and all of you, that I ask you to marry me. I'm very awkward at professing, I know, but you understand, don't you? You always do."

"Yes, I understand," Gay replied, as she dried her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. "Poor, dear old boy, I know--but oh, Chris--"

"Can't you?" he asked earnestly, leaning a little towards her, his clean-cut face looking thinner and sharper in the dim light. "We could be very happy."

"There are so many things in the way," Gay said. "It isn't because I don't care for you--you know that. There's Frank, you see, he's so helpless even as it is, and without me he'd go all to bits."

"He could live with us," suggested Chris, eager to overcome such a trifling difficulty as this seemed.

"I don't want to marry anybody for ever so long, Chris. Can't you understand that I want to have a good time--be a _girl_ as long as I can?" she said a little piteously. "And Trotting is my last, or, rather, my new love."

"Well, think it over, and start prejudiced in my favour if you can," said Chris, striving hard to cover up his wound.

Never show you're hit, was a maxim of his, and he lived up to it now, though his disappointment was the keenest he had ever known. It is always the man whose daring is most determined in the hunting field, whose nerve is unshaken by all the obstacles to be met with over a stiff steeplechase course, rising unruffled from a rattling fall, who is the most gentle in all the occasions of life, and Chris was gentle now.

"But I've got a chance," he said, with more assurance than he felt; "while there's life there's hope, you know, and a race is never lost till it's won--though even then there may be an objection," he added whimsically.

Carlton Mackrell, who came at that moment to claim her for his dance, and knew every change in Gay's expression, knew at once that Chris had just asked her in vain the question that he himself, up to now, had not done, for the simple reason that she would not let him.

A man loses his head, is completely _bouleversé_, when a woman stalks him, and ten to one, in sheer nervousness he gives her the desired opportunity, but with the unwilling woman, every faculty comes into play to defeat the lover's purpose. She develops strategic powers of a high order, is an adept at keeping others round her, in never being really alone with him, and while it is warming, exciting work for the girl, it is an intensely irritating experience for the man. The brute crashes straight through all obstacles to his end; a chivalrous gentleman bides his time, as Carlton bided his, and in waiting, loses his chance more often than not.