consequences were intensely interesting and that if I could but let my
thoughts guide me, they would finish the story and make it exquisite.

"Oh! did she?" I commented automatically, and cursed myself for having
conveyed a warmth of interest I certainly did not feel.

"She's so enthusiastic, isn't she? Brenda, I mean," Miss Tattersall went
on, and as I listened I compared her to the stable-clock. She, too, was a
persistent outrage, a hindrance to whatever it was that I was waiting for.

Mrs. Sturton and her husband were coming back, with an appearance of
unwillingness, into the warmth and light of the Hall. The dear lady was
still at her congratulations on the delightfulness of the evening, but
they were tempered, now, by a hint of apology for "spoiling it--to a
certain extent--I hope I haven't--by this unfortunate contretemps."

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.

"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.