houlder.

"If you can't be more reasonable, I shall cancel your remaining dances
and give them to the Riley boy." Which announcement brought him
swiftly to her side; and Lenox failed to catch his murmured reply.
They passed on without perceiving him; and he followed . . . merely
from a sense of duty!

At one of the open doorways, that flung panels of light across the
verandah, they paused; and he paused also, a few paces off. The
couples within were forming themselves into ordered squares.

"Lancers," she said, in a tone of distaste.

"Are you dancing them?" he asked.

"No."

"Come and sit out again, then; and I'll be as reasonable as you please."

She glanced quickly round the room, as if in search of something.

"Very well," she said: and turning on the threshold, came face to face
with her husband.

With a scarcely perceptible start, she acknowledged his grave bow of
recognition, and drew back to let him pass. But he remained close
enough to catch what followed.

"I'd rather dance than sit out, after all," she announced, with a brisk
change of manner.

"But, dear lady, . . . why?"

She laughed. "What a question! I thought you pretended to know
something about women? I claim the divine right of whim. _Voila,
tout_! One can't spend the evening in explanation. The spirit moves
me to romp. It's infinitely more wholesome than mooning under the
stars. All we want now is a cheery _vis-a-vis_. Ah . . . there's
Michel. The very man!"

She signalled across the room with her fan, and Michael came skidding
and slithering towards her, a delighted girl clinging to his arm:--a
girl in the glamour of her first season, a-thrill to her white kid
finger-tips because these rested on the sleeve of a living artist, who
had already paid her one or two chivalry-coated compliments.

"Now why the deuce did she weather-cock round like that?" Lenox
wondered, floundering in the quicksands of masculine ignorance.

But no answer suggested itself; because this woman, who was his, and
yet not his,--this woman, with her many-hued personality, rich in
subtle contradictions--was a sealed book to him, and seemed like to
remain so. And what, after all, are the hearts that beat closest to
our own but sealed books, which we open from time to time, at random;
too often at the wrong page? But a ballroom is no fit place for
abstract meditation. The lust of eye and ear, the pride of life,
challenge the sense at every turn, t