Page:Love Insurance - Earl Biggers (1914).djvu/138

Rh eh? But look at that Englishman. Why should I have sat up all last night writing lines to try on him? Can you tell me that?"

Lord Harrowby, indeed, seemed oblivious of Mrs. Bruce's little bon mot. He hemmed and hawed, and said he was a lucky man. But he did not mean that he was a lucky man because he had the privilege of hearing Mrs. Bruce.

Mr. Bruce slipped out of the shadows into the weariness of another formal dinner. Mrs. Bruce glittered, and he wrote the checks. He was a scraggly little man who sometimes sat for hours at a time in silence. There were those unkind enough to say that he sought back, trying to recall the reason that had led him to marry Mrs. Bruce.

When he. beheld Miss Cynthia Meyrick, and knew that he was to take her in to dinner, Mr. Bruce brightened perceptibly. None save a blind and deaf man could have failed to. Cocktails consumed, the party turned toward the dining-room. Except for the Meyricks, Martin Wall, Lord Harrowby and Paddock, Dick Minot knew none of them. There were a couple of colorless