And close behind him followed Barton, swinging his share of fairyland in his arms!  Barton the wonderful—­at his best!  Barton the wonderful—­with his best, the blonde, blonde girl of the marvelous gowns and hats.  There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever about them.  They were the handsomest couple in the room!

Furtively from her hidden corner little Eve Edgarton stood and watched them.  To her appraising eyes there were at least two other girls almost as beautiful as Barton’s partner.  But no other man in the room compared with Barton.  Of that she was perfectly sure!  His brow, his eyes, his chin, the way he held his head upon his wonderful shoulders, the way he stood upon his feet, his smile, his laugh, the very gesture of his hands!

Over and over again as she watched, these two perfect partners came circling through her vision, solemnly graceful or rhythmically hoydenish—­two fortune-favored youngsters born into exactly the same sphere, trained to do exactly the same things in exactly the same way, so that even now, with twelve years’ difference in age between them, every conscious vibration of their beings seemed to be tuned instinctively to the same key.

Bluntly little Eve Edgarton looked back upon the odd, haphazard training of her own life.  Was there any one in this world whose training had been exactly like hers?  Then suddenly her elbow went crooking up across her eyes to remember how Barton had looked in the stormy woods that night—­lying half naked—­and almost wholly dead—­at her feet.  Except for her odd, haphazard training, he would have been dead!  Barton, the beautiful—­dead?  And worse than dead—­buried?  And worse than—­

Out of her lips a little gasp of sound rang agonizingly.

And in that instant, by some trick-fashion of the dance, the rollicking music stopped right off short in the middle of a note, the lights went out, the dancers fled precipitously to their seats, and out of the arbored gallery of the orchestra a single swarthy-faced male singer stepped forth into the wan wake of an artificial moon, and lifted up a marvelous tenor voice in one of those weird folk-songs of the far-away that fairly tear the listener’s heart out of his body—­a song as sinisterly metallic as the hum of hate along a dagger-blade; a song as rapturously surprised at its own divinity as the first trill of a nightingale; a song of purling brooks and grim, gray mountain fortresses; a song of quick, sharp lights and long, low, lazy cadences; a song of love and hate; a song of all joys and all sorrows—­and then death; the song of Sex as Nature sings it—­the plaintive, wheedling, passionate song of Sex as Nature sings it yet—­in the far-away places of the earth.

To no one else in that company probably did a single word penetrate.  Merely stricken dumb by the vibrant power of the voice, vaguely uneasy, vaguely saddened, group after group of hoydenish youngsters huddled in speechless fascination around the dark edges of the hall.