“You are flattering yourself, Mr. Carleton; I am not at all afraid to dance with you,” she said—­and, oh, the tone of her!

“I shall expect you to prove that instantly,” I retorted, still looking straight into her face.

A quadrille—­the old-fashioned kind—­was called, and she looked up at me and put out her hand.  Only an idiot would wonder whether I took it.

“This isn’t a fair test,” I told her, after leading her out in position.  “You won’t be dancing with me a quarter of the time, you know.  Only the closest observer may tell, after we once get going, whom you are dancing with.”

“That,” she retorted, with a gleam in her eyes I couldn’t—­being no lady’s man—­interpret—­“that is a mere quibble, and would not hold in court.”

“It’s going to hold in this court,” I answered boldly, and wished I had not so systematically wasted my opportunities in the past—­that I had spent more time drinking tea and studying the “infernal feminine.”

She gave me a quick, puzzling glance, and as we were commanded at that instant to salute our partners, she swept me a half-curtsy that made me grit my teeth, though I tried to make my own bow quite as elaborate and mocking.  I couldn’t make her out at all during that dance.  Whenever we came together there was that little air of mockery in every move she made, and yet something in her eyes seemed to invite and to challenge.  The first time we were privileged, by the old-fashioned “caller,” to “swing our partners,” milady would have given me her finger-tips—­only I wouldn’t have it that way.  I held her as close as I dared, and—­I don’t know but I’m a fool—­she didn’t seem in any great rage over it.  Lord, how I did wish I was wise to the ways of women!

The next waltz I couldn’t have, because she was to dance it with Mr. Weaver.  So I had the fun of sitting there watching them fly around the room, and getting a good-sized dislike of the fellow over it.  I don’t pretend to be one of those large-minded men who are always painfully unprejudiced.  Weaver looked like a pretty good sort, and under other circumstances I should probably have liked him, but as it was I emphatically did not.

However, I got a waltz, after a heart-breaking delay, and it was worth waiting for.  I had felt all along that we could hit it off pretty well together, and we did.  We didn’t say much—­we just floated off into another world—­or I did—­and there was nothing I wanted to say that I dared say.  I call that a good excuse for silence.

Afterward I asked her for another, and she looked at me curiously.

“You’re a very hard man to convince, Mr. Carleton,” she told me, with that same queer look in her eyes.  I was beginning to get drunk—­intoxicated, if you like the word better—­on those same eyes; they always affected me, somehow, as if I’d never seen them before; always that same little tingle of surprise went over me when she lifted those heavy fringes of lashes.  I’m not psychologist enough to explain this, and I’m strictly no good at introspection; it was that way with me, and that will have to do.