“May I help you?” he asked with distant and chilly politeness.

“Oh, can’t you wait a minute?” She impatiently thrust aside his offer.  “I must get my breath again.”

It was plain that she was very angry, that she was in the clutch of a smothered yet violent resentment, which, he inferred with reason, was directed less against himself than against some abstract and impersonal law of life.  Her rage was not merely temper against a single human being; it was, he realized, a passionate rebellion against Fate or Nature, or whatever she personified as the instrument of the injustice from which she suffered.  Her eyes were gleaming through the web of light and shadow; her mouth was trembling; and there was the moisture of tears—­or was it only the glitter of ice?—­on her round young cheek.  And while he looked, chilled, disapproving, unsympathetic, at the vivid flower-like bloom of her face, there seemed to flow from her and envelop him the spirit of youth itself—­of youth adventurous, intrepid, and defiant; of youth rejecting the expedient and demanding the impossible; of youth eternally desirable, enchanting, and elusive.  It was as if his orderly, complacent, and tranquil soul had plunged suddenly into a bath of golden air.  Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to appear dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon.  He had no inclination for a flirtation with the Governor’s daughter—­intuitively he felt that such an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what she wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, “there might be trouble.”  He didn’t know what she meant, but whatever it was, she evidently meant it with determination.  Already she had impressed him with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as “wildness.”  It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly, alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of “wildness,” of unexpectedness, of “something different” in her personality, had held his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt.  He felt vaguely troubled.  Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought.  The noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable distance of empty space.  Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes.  And both the empty space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part of the hidden country within his mind.

“You were at the ball,” she burst out suddenly, as if she had been holding back the charge from the beginning.

“At the ball?” he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips merely in that objective world of routine and habit.  “Yes, I was there.  It was a dull business.”

She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before.  Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting note of tragedy in her voice.  “Was it dull?  I didn’t notice.”