Don't worry about anything happening at the ball. There's too many other suitors buzzing around her.
I'm afraid, BTW, that this is going to have to be the last installment for a while. There's a publisher interested in putting out a collection of my short stories featuring Dan Sullivan (the protagonist of my upcoming novel,
An Obscure Grave). the same publisher, in fact, that did the Sherlock Holmes anthology in which I had a story recently.
So I'm trying to track down versions of stories that were published years back before my old computer crashed and destroyed the files, and am rewriting a few Dan stories that didn't sell (and didn't really deserve to), to make them publishable, and round out the collection.
For the nonce, Dan trumps Mike and Jane.
JIM