spasms, a sort of
blissful torture. The room swam, the tune was endless; and in about a
quarter of an hour the only other woman in the figure dropped out
exhausted, and sank panting on a bench.

The reel instantly resolved itself into a four-handed one. Car'line
would have given anything to leave off; but she had, or fancied she had,
no power, while Mop played such tunes; and thus another ten minutes
slipped by, a haze of dust now clouding the candles, the floor being of
stone, sanded. Then another dancer fell out--one of the men--and went
into the passage, in a frantic search for liquor. To turn the figure
into a three-handed reel was the work of a second, Mop modulating at the
same time into 'The Fairy Dance,' as better suited to the contracted
movement, and no less one of those foods of love which, as manufactured
by his bow, had always intoxicated her.

In a reel for three there was no rest whatever, and four or five minutes
were enough to make her remaining two partners, now thoroughly blown,
stamp their last bar and, like their predecessors, limp off into the next
room to get something to drink. Car'line, half-stifled inside her veil,
was left dancing alone, the apartment now being empty of everybody save
herself, Mop, and their little girl.

She flung up the veil, and cast her eyes upon him, as if imploring him to
withdraw himself and his acoustic magnetism from the atmosphere. Mop
opened one of his own orbs, as though for the first time, fixed it
peeringly upon her, and smiling dreamily, threw into his strains the
reserve of expression which he could not afford to waste on a big and
noisy dance. Crowds of little chromatic subtleties, capable of drawing
tears from a statue, proceeded straightway from the ancient fiddle, as if
it were dying of the emotion which had been pent up within it ever since
its banishment from some Italian city where it first took shape and
sound. There was that in the look of Mop's one dark eye which said: 'You
cannot leave off, dear, whether you would or no!' and it bred in her a
paroxysm of desperation that defied him to tire her down.

She thus continued to dance alone, defiantly as she thought, but in truth
slavishly and abjectly, subject to every wave of the melody, and probed
by the gimlet-like gaze of her fascinator's open eye; keeping up at the
same time a feeble smile in his face, as a feint to signify it was still
her own pleasure which led her on. A terrified embar