Edmund had never disliked a question more.

“I’ll tell you all I know,” he said unblushingly, “but not to-night, old fellow.  It would take too long.”

And to his joy a countess and a beauty seized upon the terribly curious diplomatist and made him take her down to supper.  And they agreed while they supped exquisitely that the real job dear old Grosse ought to be given was that of husband to their hostess.

“But then there is poor Rose Bright.”

“Lady Rose Bright would not have him when he was rich,” he objected.  “No; this will do very nicely.  If I am not mistaken (and I’m pretty well read in human eyes), the lady is willing.”

After supper there was dancing.  Edmund did not dance.  He stood in a corner, his tall form a little bent, merely watching, and presently he turned away.  He had made up his mind.  He would not try to speak to Molly to-night, and he would not ask her for a talk.

She was dancing as he left the room, and he turned half mechanically to watch her.  It was always an exquisite pleasure to see her dance.  He left her with a curious sense of farewell in his mind.  Fate was coming fast, he knew; he could not doubt that for a moment.  He was not the man to avert it.  No one could avert it.  It was part of the tragedy that, pity her as he might, he could not really wish to avert it.  He would give no warning.  Some other hand must write “Mene Thekel Phares” on the wall of her palace of pleasure and success.

Edmund Grosse declined the task.

Molly danced on in the long gallery between its walls of mirrors and their infinite repetitions of twinkling candles and dancing figures pleasantly confused to the eye by the delicate wreaths of gold foliage that divided their panes.  In the immeasurable depths of those reflections the nearest objects melted by endless repetition into dim distances, and the present dancing figures might seem to melt into a far past where men and women were dancing also.

Gallery within gallery in that mirrored world, with very little effort of imagination, might become peopled by different generations.  As the figures receded in space so they receded in time.  Groups of human beings, with all the subtle ease of a decadent civilisation, ceded their place to groups of men and women who moved with more slowness and dignity in the middle distance of those endless reflections.  And looking down those avenues of gilded foliage into that fancied past, the old cry might well rise to the lips:  “What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!”

But, whether in the foreground of to-day, or in the secrets that the mirrors held of a century before, or in the indistinguishable mist of their greatest depths, wherever the imagination roamed, it found in every group of human beings a woman who was young and beautiful, and yet it could come back to the dancing figure of Molly without any shock of disappointment or disdain.