Jack Hodge remarked. "Perhaps I should slip down and lend the leader my flask or something."
"It's the band from the Rendezvous, Jackie," she countered. "You should know by experience that they do not get really good until about three in the morning. But perhaps if you present another fifty dollars to our treasury, I could do something."
"You might dance with me—that would inspire them," he suggested, with an admiring glance at her. By jove, he always knew she was a corker, but to-night she was absolutely devastating.
And Jack Hodge was an excellent judge of pretty women. She consented and was about to plunge into the crowd toward the dance platform with him when a gray-bearded man hailed her from the top step of Rao-Singh's lantern-hung piazza. He was Mr. Howard Church, the only male member of the arrangement committee and a prominent New York banker whose duties, now that the receipts for the week were almost all in, had just commenced. He had come from the study of Rao-Singh's house, which the Indian prince had set aside for the committee to use that evening as an office.
"Will you step in just a moment please, Mrs. Drake?" he asked and with an apology to
