CHAPTER V.
The hero of the fete, with the dark-eyed little beauty upon his arm, reached the top of the second flight of stairs; and here, beyond a spacious landing, where two proud-like darkies tended a crystalline punch bowl, four wide archways in a rose-vine lattice framed gliding silhouettes of waltzers, already smoothly at it to the castanets of "La Paloma." Old John Minafer, evidently surfeited, was in the act of leaving these delights.

"D'want 'ny more o' that!" he barked.

"Just slidin' around! Call that dancin'?
Rather see a jig any day in the world! They ain't very modest, some of 'em.

I don't mind that, though.
Not me!" Miss Fanny Minafer was no longer in charge of him: he emerged from the ballroom escorted by a middle-aged man of commonplace appearance.

The escort had a dry, lined face upon which, not ornamentally but as a matter of course, there grew a business man's short moustache; and his thin neck showed an Adam's apple, but not conspicuously, for there was nothing conspicuous about him.