Page:The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/36

26 superior to embarrassment—had resolved itself, we were left to divine, into an effort recognized at the moment as not absolutely a blot on what the public was so good as to call his reputation.

"Play up—play up!" cried Blanche Adney, tapping her husband, and remembering how, on the stage, a contretemps is always drowned in music. Adney threw himself upon his fiddle, and I said to Clare Vawdrey that his mistake could easily be corrected by his sending for the manuscript. If he would tell me where it was I would immediately fetch it from his room. To this he replied, "My dear fellow, I'm afraid there is no manuscript."

"Then you've not written anything?"

"I'll write it to-morrow."

"Ah, you trifle with us!" I said, in much mystification.

Vawdrey hesitated an instant. "If there is anything, you'll find it on my table."

At this moment one of the others spoke to him, and Lady Mellifont remarked audibly, as if to correct gently our want of consideration, that Mr. Adney was playing