To this accompaniment the girl danced.

Had any British matrons been present we must hope they would have walked out, yet, to the eye of the artist, there was nothing coarse or offending, simply a most beautiful harmony of motion.  The girl’s beauty, her grace and youth, and the slight lissomness of all her body lent to the dance a poetry, a refinement it would not have possessed with another exponent.

Moreover, though there was a certain ardour in her looks and gestures, in the way she yielded her limbs and body to the influence of the music, yet there was also a gay innocence, a bright naive irresponsibility in it that contrasted strongly with the sinister intention underlying all the movements of the other two Indian dancers.  At the end of the dance Hamilton took a rupee from his pocket and threw it across the tin lamps towards her feet.  She picked it up smiling, though she left the other coins which fell on the stage untouched, and went back to her chair.

After her dance, the great negro came forward and did a turn of his own.  Hamilton looked away.  What was this man to the little circle? he wondered.  He could not keep his mind off that one query?  Were they his slaves? willing or unwilling? did they constitute his harem? or were they paid, independent workers?  His mind was made up to get speech with this one girl, at least, that evening.  This delightful feeling of interest, this pleasure, even this keen disgust, all were so welcome to him in the dreary mental state of indifference that had become his habit, that he welcomed them eagerly, and could not let them go.  Beyond this there was rising within him, suddenly and overwhelmingly, the force of Life, indignant at the long repression it had been subjected to.  Man may be a civilized being, accustomed to the artificial restraints and laws he has laid upon himself, but there remains within him still that primitive nature that knows nothing, and never will learn anything of those laws, and which leaps up suddenly after years of its prison-life in overpowering revolt, and says, “Joy is my birthright.  I will have it!”

This moment is the crisis of most lives.  It was with Hamilton now, and it seemed suddenly to him that twenty years of fidelity to an unloved, unloving woman was enough.  The debt contracted at the altar twenty years before had been paid off.  The promise, given under a misunderstanding to one who had wilfully deceived him, was wiped out.  It was a marvel to him in those moments how it had held him so long.

Hamilton had one of those keen, brilliant minds that make their decisions quickly, and rarely regret them.  He took his resolution now.  That prisoner in revolt within him should be free; he would strike off the fetters he had worn too long and vainly.  He was before the open book of Life, at that page where he had stood so long.  With a firm decisive hand he would take the new page, and turn it over.  That last page, on which his wife’s name was written large, was completely done with, closed.