“I hope she will invite you to join our party,” she said naively.

“If she does not, I will invite you both to join mine,” declared Keith.  “I have no idea of letting you escape for another dozen years.”

Just then, however, Mrs. Norman appeared.  She was with Ferdy Wickersham, who, on seeing Keith, looked away coldly.  She smiled, greatly surprised to find Keith there.  “Why, where did you two know each other?”

They explained.

“I saw you were pleasantly engaged, so I did not think it necessary to hasten back,” she said to Lois.

Ferdy Wickersham said something to her in an undertone, and she held out her hand to the girl.

“Come, we are to join a party in the supper-room.  We shall see you after supper, Mr. Keith?”

Keith said he hoped so.  He was conscious of a sudden wave of disappointment sweeping over him as the three left him.  The young girl gave him a bright smile.

Later, as he passed by, he saw only Ferdy Wickersham with Mrs. Norman.  Lois Huntington was at another table, so Keith joined her.

After the supper there was to be a novel kind of entertainment:  a sort of vaudeville show in which were to figure a palmist, a gentleman set down in the programme with its gilt printing as the “Celebrated Professor Cheireman”; several singers; a couple of acrobatic performers; and a danseuse:  “Mlle. Terpsichore.”

The name struck Keith with something of sadness.  It recalled old associations, some of them pleasant, some of them sad.  And as he stood near Lois Huntington, on the edge of the throng that filled the large apartment where the stage had been constructed, during the first three or four numbers he was rather more in Gumbolt than in that gay company in that brilliant room.

“Professor Cheireman” had shown the wonders of the trained hand and the untrained mind in a series of tricks that would certainly be wonderful did not so many men perform them.  Mlle. de Voix performed hardly less wonders with her voice, running up and down the scale like a squirrel in a cage, introducing trills into songs where there were none, and making the simplest melodies appear as intricate as pieces of opera.  The Burlystone Brothers jumped over and skipped under each other in a marvellous and “absolutely unrivalled manner.”  And presently the danseuse appeared.

Keith was standing against the wall thinking of Terpy and the old hail with its paper hangings in Gumbolt, and its benches full of eager, jovial spectators, when suddenly there was a roll of applause, and he found himself in Gumbolt.  From the side on which he stood walked out his old friend, Terpy herself.  He had not been able to see her until she was well out on the stage and was making her bow.  The next second she began to dance.

After the first greeting given her, a silence fell on the room, the best tribute they could pay to her art, her grace, her abandon.  Nothing so audacious had ever been seen by certainly half the assemblage.  Casting aside the old tricks of the danseuse, the tipping and pirouetting and grimacing for applause, the dancer seemed oblivious of her audience and as though she were trying to excel herself.  She swayed and swung and swept from side to side as though on wings.