d like some trapped wood-thing
resisting. Now, her slender body swaying to his every motion, she was
another creature. Under the drooping tawny hair her face was almost as
pale as the white satin of her gown; her lips were parted, and as they
moved, he could feel her heart rise and fall to her languorous breath.

There was no speech between them; for those few golden moments all
else vanished utterly, and he guided by instinct, as oblivious to the
floor-full as if he were drifting through some enchanted ether, holding
to his breast the incarnation of all loveliness, a thing of as frail
enchantment as the glow of stars upon snow, yet for him always the one
divine vision!

CHAPTER XXXVI

BY THE SUN-DIAL

Eyes arched with fan-shielded whispers, and fair faces, fore-shortened
as they turned back over powder-white shoulders, followed their
swallow-like movement. From an ever-widening circle of masculine
devotees Katharine Fargo watched them with a smile that cloaked an
increasing and unwelcome question.

Katharine had never looked more handsome; a critical survey of her
mirror at Gladden Hall had assured her of that. Never had her poise been
more superb, her toilet more enrapturing. She was exquisitely gowned in
rose-colored mousseline-de-soie, embroidered in tiny brilliants laid
on in Greek patterns. From her neck, in a single splendid loop of
iridescence against the rosy mist, depended those fabulous pearls--"the
kind you simply _can't_ believe," as Betty Page confided to her
partner--on whose newspaper reproduction (actual diameter) metropolitan
shop-girls had been wont to gaze with glistening eyes; and within their
milky circlet, on her rounded breast, trembled three pale gold-veined
orchids.

Watching that quadrille through her drooping emerald-tinted eyes, she
had received a sudden enlightening impression of Shirley's flawless
beauty. At the tournament her fleeting glimpse had adjudged the other
merely sweetly pretty. The Chalmers' surrey had stopped en route for
Shirley, but in her wraps and veil she had then been all but invisible.
This had been Katharine's first adequate view, and the sight of her
radiant charm had the effect almost of a blow.

For Katharine, be it said, had wholly surrendered to the old, yet new,
attraction that had swept her on the tourney field. This feeling was
no less cerebral and intellectual than it had been: she was no Galatea
waiting her Pygmalion. But it was strong for all