actised skill. There was a
startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and
swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping,
now limping, now running.

He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and found her to his
whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience. Holding her thus
intimately in the brief wedlock of the dance, he began to love her in
a way that he could think of only one word for--_terrible_.

She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging them,
and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was also a flattering spice of
jealousy in what she murmured:

"You haven't spent all your afternoons and evenings building ships,
young man!"

"No?"

"What cabarets have you graduated from?"

He quoted her own words, "Don't you wish you knew?"

"No."

"One thing is certain. I've never found in any of 'em as light a
feather as you."

"Are you referring to my head or my feet?"

"Your blessed feet!"

His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he whirled her in a
delirium of motion.

"That's unfair!" she protested, affrighted yet delighted by the fire
of his ecstasy in their union. The music stopped, and she clung to him
dizzily while he applauded with the other dancers till the band
renewed the tune. She had regained her mental with her bodily
equilibrium, and she danced more staidly; yet she had seen into the
crater of his heart and was not sorry that it existed.

The reprise of the dance was brief, and he had to surrender her from
his embrace. He was unwontedly rhapsodic. "I wish we could sail on and
on and on forever."

"Forever is a long time," she smiled.

"May I have the next dance?"

"Certainly not! Take Polly round and pay for your supper. But
don't--"

"Don't what?"

"I don't know."

Polly was taken for the next dance, and he was glad of it, but he
suffered at seeing how perfectly Mamise footed it with a young
officer who also knew how to compel her to his whim. Davidge wondered
if Mamise could be responding to this fellow as keenly as she
responded to himself. The thought was intolerable. She could not be
so wanton. It would amount to a hideous infidelity. Moorish jealousy
smoldered in his heart, and he cursed public dancing as an infamous,
an unbelievable promiscuity. Yet when he had Polly Widdicombe for
the next dance, her husband had no cause for jealousy. Polly was a
temperate dancer, all gaiety, estheticism p