“There are no old people here,” said Arnold.  “I have not seen any.”

“It seems to me there are no young,” answered Caroline.

“There are neither young nor old,” said Arnold; “that is the trouble.”

But he began to play a soft, dreamy waltz.  It was full of bewitching invitation.  No one could resist it.  It passed into a wild, stirring polka, into a maddening galop, back again to a dreamy waltz.  Now it was dizzying, whirling; now it was languishing, full of repose.  Now it was the burst and clangor of a full orchestra; now it was the bewitching appeal of a single voice that invited to dance.  Up and down the long room, across the broad room, the dancers moved.  The room, that had been so full of quiet, was swaying with motion.

Caroline seized hold of the back of a chair to stay herself.

“It whirls me on; how dizzying it is!  And you, would you not like to join in the dance?  I would be your partner.”

“The piano is my partner,” answered Arnold.  “Do you not see how it whirls with me?”

“Yes, everything moves,” said Caroline.  “Are Cupid and Psyche coming to join us?  Will my great-grand-aunt come down to the waltz in her brocade?  My sober cousin, and Marie, who gave up dancing long ago,—­they are all carried away.  It seems to me like the strange dance of a Walpurgis night,—­as though I saw ghosts, and demons too, whirling over the Brocken, across wild forests.  It is no longer our gilded drawing-room, with its tapestries, its bijouterie, its sound and light both muffled:  we are out in the wild tempest; there are sighing pines, dashing waterfalls.  Do you know that is where your music carries me always?  Whether it is grave or gay, it takes me out into whirling winds, and tosses me in tempests.  They call society gay here, and dizzying,—­dance and music, show, excess, following each other; but it is all sleep, Lethe, in comparison with the mad world into which your music whirls me.  Oh, stop a moment, Arnold! will you not stop?  It is too wild and maddening!”

The strains crashed into discord, crashed into harmony, and then there was a wonderful silence.  The dancers were suddenly stilled,—­looked at each other with flushed cheek,—­would have greeted each other, as if they had just met in a foreign land; but they recovered themselves in time.  Nothing unconventional was said or done.

“Did I dance?” Marie asked herself,—­“or was I only looking on?”

One of the dancers scarcely dared to look round, lest it should prove to be the great-grand-aunt’s brocade that she heard rustle behind her; while another thanked her partner for a chair, with eyes cast down, lest it might be Cupid that offered it.  But the room was the same; there was an elegant calm over everything.  Tea-poys, light chairs, fragile vases have been undisturbed by crinoline even.

“Are you quite sure this Chinese joss was on this table, when the music began?” asked Marie’s companion of her, whisperingly.