“After this dance, ma chere—­if you desire it.”

The music began—­weird and mournful—­and a murmur went round among the eager watchers.  It was her most famous dance—­the dance of Death, the most gruesome spectacle, so it was said, that any dancer had ever conceived.  She came on to the stage like the flash of an arrow, dressed in black that glittered and scintillated with every amazing movement.  And then it began—­that most wonderful dance of hers that all the world was mad to see.

It was almost too rapid for the eye to follow in its first stages—­a fever of movement—­a delirium indescribable—­a fantasy painful to watch, but from which no watcher could turn away.  Even Saltash, who had taken small interest in the previous dance, leaned forward and gave his full attention to this, as it were in spite of himself.  The very horror of it was magnetic.  They seemed to look upon a death-struggle—­the wild fight of a creature endowed with a fiery vitality against an enemy unseen but wholly ruthless and from the first invincible.

Those who saw that dance of Rozelle Daubeni never forgot it, and there was hardly a woman in the audience who was not destined to shudder whenever the memory of it arose.  It was arresting, revolting, terrible; it must have compelled in any case.  A good many began to sob with the sheer nervous horror of it, yearning for the end upon which they were forced to look, though with a dread that made the blood run cold.

But the end was such as no one in that assembly looked for.  Just as the awful ecstasy of the dance was at its height, just as the dreaded crisis approached, and they saw with a gasping horror the inevitable final clutch of the unseen enemy upon his vanquished victim; just as she lifted her face in the last anguish of supplication, yielding the last hope, sinking in nerveless surrender before the implacable destroyer, there came a sudden flare of light in the salon, and the great crystal candelabra that hung over the end of the gallery where the man and the girl were seated watching became a dazzling sparkle of overwhelming light.

Everyone turned towards it instinctively, and Toby, hardly knowing what she did, but with the instinct to escape strong upon her, leapt to her feet.

In that moment—­as she stood in the full light—­the dancer’s eyes also shot upwards and saw the sum young figure.  It was only for a moment, but instantly a wild cry rang through the great salon—­a cry of agony so piercing that women shrieked and trembled, hiding their faces from what they knew not what.

In the flash of a second the light was gone, the gallery again in darkness.  But on the stage a woman’s voice cried thrice:  “Toinette!  Toinette!  Toinette!” in the anguished accents of a mother who cries for her dead child, and then fell into a tragic silence more poignant than any sound—­a silence that was as the silence of Death.