n?"

"Oh, mademoiselle!"

"Such fortitude, such forbearance--when I ought to be
slapped--enchants, disarms, makes me remember I am a woman, foredoomed
always to yield. I abjure my boasted independence, monsieur, I submit.
It shall be as you wish: on to Maxim's--after this one dance. You know,
it's the last really good music we'll have to dance to--our last dance
together, perhaps--who knows?--forever!"

She pretended to be overcome; the lithe body in his embrace sketched a
fugitive seizure of sadness, drooping with a wistful languour well
suited to the swooning measures to which they swayed and postured.

His hand was pressed convulsively. She seemed momentarily about to
become a burden in his grasp, yet ever to recover just on the instant
of failing, buoyed up by the steely resilience of her lithe and slender
body. Impossible to say how much was pretence, how much impulsive
confession of true feeling! Perplexed, perturbed, Lanyard gazed down
into that richly tinted face which, with eyes half-curtained and lips
half-parted, seemed to betray so much, yet to his next glance was
wholly illegible and provoking. Aware that with such women man's vanity
misleads him woefully, and aware that she was equally awake to this
masculine weakness, he wondered, afraid even to guess, telling himself
he were an ass to believe, a fool to deny....

Then suddenly he saw her lashes sweep up to unveil eyes at once
mirthful and admonitory; her hungry mouth murmured incongruously an
edged warning. "Play up, Paul--play up to me! We dance too well
together not to be watched; and if I'm not mistaken, someone you're
interested in has just come in. No: don't look yet, just remember we're
madly enamoured, you and I--and don't care a rap who sees it."

Strung by her words into a spirit of emulation, Lanyard achieved an
adequate seeming of response to the passion, feigned or real, with
which the woman infused the patterned coquetry of their steps.

Between lips that stirred so little their movement must have been
indiscernible, he asked: "Who?"

In the same manner, but in accents fraught with an emotion
indecipherable but intense the reply came: "Don't talk! This is too
divine ... Just dance!"

He obeyed, deliberately shut out of his thoughts the warning she had
given him, and let himself go, body and mind, so that, a sway to the
sensuous strains of that most sensuous of dances, the girl and the man
for a space seemed one with music that thr