She stood there, motionless, her fair head with its monstrous crest of many-coloured ostrich feathers flaming against the dead background.  Her dress was impudent.  It winked at its own transparent pretence at covering a body which was, in fact, too slender, too nervously alive to be quite beautiful (Stonehouse remembered her legs—­the long, thin legs in the parti-coloured tights, like sticks of peppermint, belabouring the rotund sides of her imperturbable pony).  But her jewels clothed her.  Their authentic fire seemed to blaze out of herself—­to be fed by her.  And each one of them, no doubt, had its romance—­its scandal.  That rope of pearls in itself was a king’s ransom.  People nudged each other.  It was part of the show that she should flaunt them.

She had been a plain child, and now, if she was really pretty at all, it was after the fashion of most French women, without right or reason, by force of some secret magnetism that was not even physical.  Her wide mouth was open in a rather vacant, childish smile, and she was looking up towards the gallery as though she were expecting something.  “Hallo, everyone!” she said tentatively, gaily.  They stared back at her, stolid and antagonistic, defying her.  She began to laugh then, as she laughed every night at the same moment, spontaneously, shrilly, helplessly, until suddenly she had them.  It was like a whirlwind.  It spared no one.  They were like dead leaves dancing helplessly in its midst.  Even Stonehouse felt it at his throat, a choking, senseless laughter.

He saw Cosgrave lean forward, and in the half light he had a queer, startled look.  With his thick red hair and small white face he might have been some sick thing of the woods scenting the air in answer to far-off familiar piping’s.  He made Robert Stonehouse see the faun in Frances Wilmot’s room, the room itself and Frances Wilmot, with her chin resting in her hands, gazing into the fire.  The picture was gone almost before he knew what he had seen.  But it was knife-sharp.  It was as though a hand fumbling over a blank wall had touched by accident a secret spring and a door had flown wide open, closing instantly.

  “I’m Gyp Labelle;
  If you dance with me
  You must dance to my tune
  Whatever it be.”

She jumped into the incessant music as a child jumps into a whirling skipping-rope.  She had a quaint French accent, but she couldn’t sing.  She had no voice.  And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture of good-humoured contempt and danced.  But she couldn’t dance either.  It was a wild gymnastic—­a display of incredible, riotous energy, the delirious caperings of a gutter-urchin caught in the midst of some gutter-urchin’s windfall by a jolly tune.  A long-haired youth leapt on to the stage from the stage-box, and caught her by the waist and swung her about him and over his shoulder so that her plumes swept the ground and the great chain of pearls made a circle of white light about them both.