As Bressant bowed to Cornelia, who courtesied grandly in return, the band struck up a waltz, which seemed to be at once reflected in her face and manner.  She was particularly sensitive to musical impressions, and instinctively looked up to Bressant’s face for sympathy, forgetting at the moment that his infirmity would probably debar him from sharing her enjoyment.  However that might be, he was certainly not indifferent to the silent music of her beauty; he was gazing down upon her with an intensity which caused her to droop her eyes, and draw an uneven breath or two.  There was in him all a man’s fire, strangely mingled with the freshness of a boy.

“Take my arm,” said he, offering it to her.  After an instant’s hesitation, more mental, however, than physical, she laid her graceful hand within it, and they moved toward the dancing-room.

But at the instant of contact an electric pulsation seemed to pass through Cornelia’s blood, imbuing it with a powerful ichor, alien to herself, yet whose potency was delicious to her.  She fancied, also, that she herself went out in the same way to her companion, establishing a magnetic interchange of personalities, so that each felt and shared the other’s thoughts and emotions.

They now stood in the principal dancing-hall, where several couples, who had already taken the floor, were revolving with various degrees of awkwardness.  The music had flowed into Cornelia’s ears until she was full of the rhythmical harmony.  She glanced up once more at her partner, this time with a lustrous look of confidence.  Was it possible that he had become inspired through her?  Certainly it seemed as if the feeling of the tune were discernible in his face as well as hers; it was even betokened by the lightsome pose of his figure, and a scarcely subdued buoyancy in his step.  Moment by moment did the occult sympathy between one another and the cadence of the music grow more assured and complete; and at length—­though precisely how it came about neither Cornelia nor Bressant could have told—­they were conscious of floating through the room, mutually supporting and leading on each other, mind and motion pulsating with the beat of the tune, amid a bright, half-seen chaos of lights, faces, and forms, dancing a waltz!

Neither felt any surprise at what, but a few moments before, both would have deemed an impossibility.  The easy, whirling sweep of the motion, not ending nor beginning, seemed, to Bressant as well as to Cornelia, the most natural thing in the world.  Beautifully as she danced, he was no whit her inferior.  They moved in complete accord.  Years of practice could not have made the harmony more perfect.