On the floor a score of couples pulsed rhythmically to the swinging waltz-time music.  Starched shirts and frock coats were not.  The men wore their wolf- and beaver-skin caps, with the gay-tasselled ear-flaps flying free, while on their feet were the moose-skin moccasins and walrus-hide muclucs of the north.  Here and there a woman was in moccasins, though the majority danced in frail ball-room slippers of silk and satin.  At one end of the hall a great open doorway gave glimpse of another large room where the crowd was even denser.  From this room, in the lulls in the music, came the pop of corks and the clink of glasses, and as an undertone the steady click and clatter of chips and roulette balls.

The small door at the rear opened, and a woman, befurred and muffled, came in on a wave of frost.  The cold rushed in with her to the warmth, taking form in a misty cloud which hung close to the floor, hiding the feet of the dancers, and writhing and twisting until vanquished by the heat.

“A veritable frost queen, my Lucile,” Colonel Trethaway addressed her.

She tossed her head and laughed, and, as she removed her capes and street-moccasins, chatted with him gayly.  But of Corliss, though he stood within a yard of her, she took no notice.  Half a dozen dancing men were waiting patiently at a little distance till she should have done with the colonel.  The piano and violin played the opening bars of a schottische, and she turned to go; but a sudden impulse made Corliss step up to her.  It was wholly unpremeditated; he had not dreamed of doing it.

“I am very sorry,” he said.

Her eyes flashed angrily as she turned upon him.

“I mean it,” he repeated, holding out his hand.  “I am very sorry.  I was a brute and a coward.  Will you forgive me?”

She hesitated, and, with the wisdom bought of experience, searched him for the ulterior motive.  Then, her face softened, and she took his hand.  A warm mist dimmed her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

But the waiting men had grown impatient, and she was whirled away in the arms of a handsome young fellow, conspicuous in a cap of yellow Siberian wolf-skin.  Corliss came back to his companion, feeling unaccountably good and marvelling at what he had done.

“It’s a damned shame.”  The colonel’s eye still followed Lucile, and Vance understood.  “Corliss, I’ve lived my threescore, and lived them well, and do you know, woman is a greater mystery than ever.  Look at them, look at them all!” He embraced the whole scene with his eyes.  “Butterflies, bits of light and song and laughter, dancing, dancing down the last tail-reach of hell.  Not only Lucile, but the rest of them.  Look at May, there, with the brow of a Madonna and the tongue of a gutter-devil.  And Myrtle—­for all the world one of Gainsborough’s old English beauties stepped down from the canvas to riot out the century in Dawson’s dance-halls.