Strung by her words into a spirit of emulation, Lanyard achieved an adequate seeming of response to the passion, feigned or real, with which the woman infused the patterned coquetry of their steps.

Between lips that stirred so little their movement must have been indiscernible, he asked:  “Who?”

In the same manner, but in accents fraught with an emotion indecipherable but intense the reply came:  “Don’t talk!  This is too divine ...  Just dance!”

He obeyed, deliberately shut out of his thoughts the warning she had given him, and let himself go, body and mind, so that, a sway to the sensuous strains of that most sensuous of dances, the girl and the man for a space seemed one with music that throbbed of love and longing, desire and denial, pursuit and retreat, surrender and conquest....

On a sonorous phrase it ceased.  A flutter of applause ran round the tables.  Lanyard mastered a sense of daze that he saw reflected in the opening eyes of the woman as she slipped from his arms.  In an instant they were themselves once more, two completely self-contained children of sophistication, with superb insouciance making nothing of their public triumph in a rare and difficult performance.

On the way to their table they were intercepted by a woman who, with two cavaliers, had since the moment of her entrance been standing near the door of the restaurant, apparently spellbound with admiration.  Through a rising clatter of tongues her voice cut clearly but not at all unpleasantly.

“Athenais!  It is I—­Liane.”

Inured as he was to the manners of an age which counts its women not dressed if they are not half undressed, and with his sensibilities further calloused by a night devoted to restaurants the entree to which, for women, seemed to be conditioned on at least semi-nudity, Lanyard was none the less inclined to think he had never seen, this side of footlights, a gown quite so daring as that which revealed the admirably turned person of the lady who named herself Liane.  There was so little of it that, he reflected, its cost must have been something enormous.  But in vain that scantiness of drapery:  the white body rose splendidly out of its ineffective wrappings only to be overwhelmed by an incredible incrustation of jewellery:  only here and there did bare hand’s-breadths of flesh unadorned succeed in making themselves visible.

At the sound of her name Athenais turned with a perfectly indicated start of surprise which she promptly translated into a little, joyful cry.  The living pillar of ivory, satin and precious stones ran into her arms, embraced her ardently, and kissed both her cheeks, then releasing her half-turned to Lanyard.

Glints of trifling malice winked behind the open interest of troubling, rounded eyes of violet.  Lanyard knew himself known.

So he had sacrificed for nothing his beautiful beard!

He uttered a private but heartfelt “Damn!” and bowed profoundly as the woman, tapping Athenais on the arm with a fan crusted with diamonds, demanded: