Four dances from now! What should he do meanwhile? To dance with anyone else would be desecration. Suddenly Tommy Winchester appeared.

“I say,” he wheezed in his funny voice like a miniature organ-blower’s. “Have you been down to supper yet? I’ve been down four times. You should see the ices they’ve got.”

Ices after the experience he’d been having! Nevertheless he was interested.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“Down there,” said Tommy, pointing to some stairs. “That’s the back stairs, and you can go down as often as you please and nobody sees.”

At that moment there came round the corner the supercilious figure of the Dean’s Ernest. He was very elegant, more elegant—as Jeremy was forced to confess—than himself would ever be.

“Hallo, you fellows,” said Ernest. He was twelve, and was going next year to Rugby. It was irritating the way that he was always a year ahead of Jeremy in everything. “I call it pretty rotten,” he said, smoothing his gloves. “The band’s not first class and the floor’s awful.”

“Well, I think it’s splendid,” said Jeremy.

“Oh, do you?” said Ernest scornfully. “You would! Ever been to a dance before?”

“Yes, lots,” said Jeremy, and it is to be hoped that Heaven will forgive him that lie.

“Well, it’s my belief that it’s his first,” said Ernest confidentially to Tommy. “What a kid like that’s doing away from his nurse I can’t think.” Nevertheless he moved away, because Jeremy had grown remarkably thick and sturdy during the last year, and had already in Polchester a pugnacious reputation.

“I say,” said Tommy, who seemed to have been long ago forced by his appearance of good-natured chubbiness into the rÔle of perpetual peacemaker, “you can get to the supper down there,” pointing to the stairs. “You should see the ices they’ve got. I’ve been four times.”

“Have they?” said the Dean’s Ernest, his sallow countenance freshening. “Can you get down that way?”

“You bet!” said Tommy.

“Come on, then.” They disappeared.

Jeremy was rather distressed by this encounter. Ernest had had the last word. He wished that he had been able to say “Sucks to you!” which, in addition to being the cry of the moment, was applicable to almost every occasion. Never mind. The opportunity would undoubtedly return. Such an episode should not cloud his happiness.

He seemed to be moving, clouded by the great white fan that she had used. That hid him from the rest of the world. He did indeed dance with Helen (and would have danced with Mary could he have found her); he danced also with a little girl with spots; but in these dances he was blinded and stunned with the light from Juno’s eyes. It was an utterly new experience to him. He could compare it with nothing at all save the day when Stevens, the football captain, had said he “had stood it well over his eye,” and once when he had gone to have a tooth out and the dentist hadn’t taken it after all. And this again was different from those. It was like hot coffee and summer lightning and chestnuts bursting as they fell from the autumn trees; not that he made those comparisons consciously, of course.

Most of all it was like a dream, the most wonderful of all his nights. The third dance was over. He must go and find her.