’Why, cruel one, did you play this trick on me?  Can you not see what I suffer!’ It was her sad glittering eyes that reproachfully appealed to him.

‘Did I know what would happen?’ his answered.  ’Am I not equally a victim?’

She smiled pensively, and her lips murmured:  ’Well, wonders will never cease.’

Such were the first words.

‘I found I had to come back to London,’ he was soon explaining.  ’And I met young Burgess at the Empire on Thursday night, and he told me about this affair and gave me a ticket, and so I thought as I had been at the opera I might as well——­’ He hesitated.

‘Have you seen the girls?’ she inquired.

He had not.

On the flower-bordered staircase her foot slipped; she felt like a convalescent trying to walk after a long illness.  Arthur with a silent questioning gesture offered his arm.

‘Yes, please,’ she said, gladly.  She wished not to say it, but she said it, and the next instant he was supporting her up the steps.  Anything might happen now, she thought; the most impossible things might come to pass.

At the top of the staircase they paused.  They could hear the music faintly through closed doors.  They had the precious illusion of being aloof, apart, separated from the world, sufficient to themselves and gloriously sufficient.  Then some one opened the doors from within; the sound of the music, suddenly freed, rushed out and smote them; and they entered the ball-room.  She was acutely conscious of her beauty, and of the distinction of his blanched, stern face.

* * * * *

The floor was thronged by entwined couples who, under the rhythmic domination of the music, glided and revolved in the elaborate pattern of a mazurka.  With their rapt gaze, and their rigid bodies floating smoothly over a hidden mechanism of flying feet, they seemed to be the victims of some enchantment, of which the music was only a mode, and which led them enthralled through endless curves of infallible beauty and grace.  Form, colour, movement, melody, and the voluptuous galvanism of delicate contacts were all combined in this unique ritual of the dance, this strange convention whose significance emerged from one mystery deeper than the fundamental notes of the bass-fiddle, and lost itself in another more light than the sudden flash of a shirt-front or the tremor of a lock of hair.  The goddess reigned.  And round about the hall, the guardians of decorum, the enemies of Aphrodite, enchanted too, watched with the simplicity of doves the great Aphrodisian festival, blind to the eternal verities of a satin slipper, a drooping eyelash, a parted lip.