“And I,” he answered, “shall not dance.  I am going to sequester myself in the woods and pray the gods of fair auspices that you won’t be too angry.”

CHAPTER XI

Mary Burton made her way between tall hedgerows of box where an alley of shade ran to a side terrace, and when she had gained her own room her eyes were aglow with a new and rather radiant sort of smile, that also crept to the corners of her lips and hovered happily.  It was a vague smile, but if the man who had enticed it there had seen it, he would have felt reassured.  The threat of tomorrow’s wrath would not have troubled him.

When Mary Burton, changed into bedroom attire, had dismissed her maid for the night, she still moved about with a restlessness which did not at once yield to the composure needed for the rigid self-analysis upon which she was resolved.  She stood before the mirror and looked gravely into the glass.

With the lustrous masses of hair falling braided over her shoulders and the new glow of discovery in her eyes she might have been a girl just budding into womanhood.  She seemed in the last hour to have slipped back into the blossom time of her beauty—­and though it was a beauty which she had always realized she now felt a new happiness in its possession.  Heretofore her pride had been such as one feels for a means of conquest.

Now it was different.  Her breast rose suddenly and fell to the excitement of a subtly powerful emotion.  This beauty had a new value.  It might be a prize worth surrendering proudly and as a gift to a man of her choosing.  If this rainbow of promised love proved real she would wish herself even lovelier—­for his pleasure.  It was of course too soon to feel sure—­and at that thought a sudden gasp of fear rose in her throat.  At all events it was not too early to hope that the night had brought her the thing for which she had yearned—­brought the commencement.  She gave to the face in the mirror a friendly smile.  “This afternoon I rather hated you,” she announced gravely.  “I gazed at you and a soulless little pig stared back ... but who knows?  Maybe down under your vanity and selfishness you have after all the cobwebbed little germ of a soul.  If so we must dig it out and brush it off and put it to work.”

Then she turned out the lights and sank down dreamily in the broad window seat.  The moon rode high and bathed the hills in its limpid yet elusive wash of silver and blue and dove grays.  Far off like a brush-stroke from a dream palette ran the horizon’s margin of hills and nearer at hand tapering poplars stood up like dark sentinels.  The lights and music told of the dance still in progress and strolling figures occasionally crossed the silver patches between the shadows.

In her own mind she was reviewing all the men who with her had sought to throw off the mantle of the Platonic and invest themselves in the more romantic habiliments of courtship.  One lesson had been taught her from the first, and she had learned it thoroughly—­too thoroughly!  She was no ordinary girl to give way to unwise throbbing of the pulses.  Her future must run side by side with brilliant things and brilliant men.