“The ballet is very important to-night,” Nina heard the marchese saying to the Princess Sansevero.  “La Favorita is to appear in the Birth of Venus.  She does another dance first—­a Spanish one, I think.”

As he spoke, the ballet music had already begun, and the Spanish coryphees were twisting and bowing, and straightening their spines as they danced to the beat of their castanettes.  Then they moved aside for the ballerina.

It may have been intended as a Spanish dance, or Eastern, or gypsy—­but it was more likely a dance of La Favorita’s own imagination.  She appeared clad in a thin slip of transparent and jetted gauze.  Upon her feet were socks and ballet slippers of black satin.  A black mask covered the upper part of her face, and her black hair was drawn high and held with a diamond bracelet; she wore a diamond collar, long diamond earrings, and the gauze of her upper garment—­which could hardly be called a bodice—­was held on one shoulder with a band of diamonds.  For the space of a second she faced the audience, standing still and rigid; then, with a quiver, the rigidity was shattered!  A serpent’s coiling was not more swift than the movement of her dazzling, glittering form, which twirled and turned and bent, while the twinkling rapidity of her steps was faster than the eye could follow.  A twirl, another twirl, a flash—­and she was gone.

[Illustration:  “FOR THE SPACE OF A SECOND SHE FACED THE AUDIENCE, STANDING STILL AND RIGID”]

The coryphees, who had seemingly danced well before, were now so awkward by comparison that Nina and Tornik laughed aloud.

“They look like cows,” commented Tornik.

“Or nailed to the ground,” Nina rejoined.  She leaned forward, eager for Favorita’s reappearance.

To make a background for the second dance, the stage hands had moved in folding wings or screens of sea green.  The calciums had gradually been turning to the blue of moonlight, and now, at the back of the stage, Venus arose, veiled in a mist of foam.

Seeming scarcely to touch her feet to the ground, the dancer was a puff of the foam itself, a living fragment of green and white spray.  She caught her arms full of the sea-colored gauze, like a great billow above her head, and then with a swirl she bent her body and drew the diaphanous film out sideways, like a wave that had run up on the sands.  Drawing it together again, she seemed to produce another breaker.

So perfectly was the fabric handled that it seemed exactly like the spray of the sea, which, in its freshness, clung to her, and at the last, by a wonderful illusion, she gave the appearance of having gone under the waves.

For several seconds the house remained absolutely hushed, and in that moment Nina found herself vaguely groping through a confusion of ecstatic, yet slightly shocked, sensations.  She wondered whether La Favorita had really nothing on except a number of yards of tulle which she held in her hands.