‘Why,’ Leonora exclaimed, her excitement straining impatiently in the leash, ‘The Blue Danube!’

He laughed, quietly gay.

While the chords, with tantalising pauses and deliberation, approached the magic moment of the waltz itself, she was conscious that his hold of her became firmer and more assertive, and she surrendered to an overmastering influence as one surrenders to chloroform, desperately, but luxuriously.

And when at the invitation of the melody the whole company in the centre of the floor broke into movement, and the spell was resumed, she lost all remembrance of that which had passed, and all apprehension of that which was to come.  She lived, passionately and yet languorously, in the vivid present.  Her eyes were level with his shoulder, and they looked with an entranced gaze along his arm, seeing automatically the faces, the lights, and the colours which swam in a rapid confused procession across their field of vision.  She did not reason nor recognise.  These fleeting images, appearing and disappearing on the horizon of Arthur’s elbow, produced no effect on her.  She had no thoughts.  Her entire being was absorbed in a transport of obedience to the beat of the music, and to Arthur’s directing pressures.  She was happy, but her bliss had in it that element of stinging pain, of intolerable anticipation, which is seldom absent from a felicity too intense.  ’Surely I shall sink down and die!’ said her heart, seeming to faint at the joyous crises of the music, which rose and fell in tides of varying rapture.  Nevertheless she was determined to drink the cup slowly, to taste every drop of that sweet and excruciating happiness.  She would not utterly abandon herself.  The fear of inanition was only a wayward pretence, after all, and her strong nature cried out for further tests to prove its fortitude and its power of dissimulation.  As the band slipped into the final section of the waltz, she wilfully dragged the time, deepening a little the curious superficial languor which concealed her secrets, and at the same time increasing her consciousness of Arthur’s control.  She dreaded now that what had been intolerable should cease; she wished ardently to avert the end.  The glare of lights, the separate sounds of the instruments, the slurring of feet on the smooth floor, the lineaments of familiar faces, all the multitudinous and picturesque detail of gyrating humanity around her—­these phenomena forced themselves on her unwilling perception; and she tried to push them back, and to spend every faculty in savouring the ecstasy of that one physical presence which was so close, so enveloping, and so inexplicably dear.  But in vain, in vain!  The band rioted through the last bars of the waltz, a strange, disconcerting silence and inertia supervened, and Arthur loosed her.

* * * * *