Across the room, he had already caught a glimpse of Corinna, in a queenly gown of white and silver brocade.  She had stopped dancing now; and standing between Alice Rokeby and John Benham, she was glancing brightly about her, while she waved slowly a fan of white ostrich plumes.  Among all these fresh young girls, she could easily hold her own, not because of her beauty, but because of that deeper fascination which she shed like a light or a perfume.  She had the something more than beauty which these girls lacked and could never acquire—­a legendary enchantment, the air of romance.  Was this the result, he wondered now, of what she had missed in life rather than of what she had attained?  Was it because she had never lived completely, because she had preferred the dream to the event, because she had desired and refrained, because she had missed both enchantment and disenchantment—­was it because of the profound inadequacy of experience, that she had been able to keep undimmed the glow of her loveliness?  It was not that she looked young, he realized while he watched her, but that she looked ageless and immortal, a creature of the spirit.  While he gazed at her across the violent whirl of colours in the ballroom, he remembered the evening star shining silver white in the afterglow.  Perhaps, who could tell, she may have had the best that life had to give?

Making his way, with difficulty, through the throng, he followed Corinna’s protecting gaze, until he saw that it rested on Alice Rokeby, who was wearing a dress that reminded him of wild hyacinths.  For a moment, the sight of this other woman’s face, with its soft, hungry eyes, and its expression of passive and unresisting sweetness, gave him a start of surprise; and he found himself knocking awkwardly against one of the dancers.  Something had happened to her!  Something had restored, if only for an evening, the peculiar grace, the appealing prettiness, too trivial and indefinite for beauty, which he recalled vividly now, though for the last year or two he had almost forgotten that she ever possessed it.  Yes, something had changed her.  She looked to-night as she used to look before he went away, with a faint flush over her whole face and those soft flower-like eyes, lifted admiringly to some man, to any man except Herbert Rokeby.  Then, as he disentangled himself from the whirl, and went toward Corinna, she came a step or two forward, and left John Benham and Alice Rokeby together.

“Everything is going well,” she said; and he noticed, for the first time, that her charming smile was tinged with irony, as if the humour of the show, not the drama, were holding her attention.  “I am having a beautiful time.”

He glanced over her shoulder.  “What have you done to Mrs. Rokeby?”

She shook her head, with a laugh which, he surmised sympathetically, was less merry than it sounded.  “That is my secret.  I have a magic you know—­but she looks well, doesn’t she?  I did her hair myself.  If you could have seen the way she had it arranged!  That dress is very becoming, I think, it makes her eyes look like frosted violets.  Her appearance is a success—­but ’More brain, O Lord, more brain’!”