ile.

The Italian was as white as paper, his mustache and brows made spots of
ink on it; his eyes were as deep and still as wells in the night. She
could hardly doubt that his heart was in a tumult, but he spoke without
disaster to his voice, thanking her in a formal phrase. She perceived,
from a distinct advantage over him in height, how faultlessly handsome
he was in a quiet, unmagnetic way. Never had she seen anything to equal
the whiteness of his teeth except her pearls in their black velvet case.

After having paid his duty to her, he remained for some minutes speaking
with Mrs. Foss, who appeared as kind, while he appeared as calm and
natural, as if time had moved back, and they were still at last spring
and the beginning of his visits. Of all concerned Aurora was the least
collected.

"I can't help it!" she murmured to Gerald, while the other two were
talking together. "I'm all of a tremble. I feel as if I were Brenda; and
at the same time I feel as if I were him--or he."

Mrs. Foss turned to them to say she believed everybody had arrived, and
with Giglioli moved away from the door. Gerald asked Mrs. Hawthorne if
they should waltz, but she refused, because she ought to be looking
after the people who were not dancing and seeing that every one had a
good time. She should dance only once that evening, she told him, and it
should be with Mr. Foss, who had promised to dance at her party if she
would promise to dance with him.

Mr. Foss was seen approaching, and Mrs. Hawthorne smiled and sparkled in
anticipation of the jokes they would exchange on her fairy weight and
his youthful limberness.

Gerald sent his eyes around the room to see if any one were free whom it
would be a sort of duty to ask to dance. He did not look for pleasure
from dancing, the less so that Charlie Hunt, on the perpetual jump, and
dancing with a perfection almost unmanly, had brought the exercise into
temporary discredit with him. Miss Madison was dancing, Miss Seymour was
dancing, Leslie was dancing, Brenda--his eyes were unable to find. In a
doorway, and not quite as festive in looks as the majority, which gave
to the room the effect of an animated flower-bed, he perceived a figure
in snuff-brown silk, just in front of which, soberly watching the
dancers, was a little girl in a short dress of embroidered white, a blue
hair-ribbon and blue enamel locket. At once dropping his search for a
partner, Gerald went to join this pair, thinking,