ess summer night.

The impression it made upon John was indescribable. He watched with
straining eyes, conscious of a deep sense of pleasure. Here was
something appealing insistently to his love of beauty pure and simple; a
new joy, a new grace, something which thrilled him and which left no
aftermath of uneasy thoughts.

The music suddenly faded away into nothing. With no more effort than
when she had glided into her poem of movement, the dancer stood in a
pose of perfect stillness. There were a few moments of tense silence.
Then came a crash of chords, and the slender white figure launched into
the dance.

Her motions became more animated, more human. With feet which seemed
never to meet the earth, she glided toward the corner where John was
standing. He caught the smoldering fire in her eyes as she danced within
a few feet of him. He felt a catch in his breath. Some subtle and only
half-expressed emotion shook his whole being, seemed to tear at the
locked chamber of his soul.

She had flung her arms forward, so near that they almost touched him. He
could have sworn that her lips had called his name. He felt himself
bewitched, filled with an insane longing to throw out his arms in
response to her passionate, unspoken invitation, in obedience to the
clamoring of his seething senses. He had forgotten, even, that any one
else was in the room.

Then, suddenly, the music stopped. The lights flared out from the
ceiling and from every corner of the apartment. Slender and erect, her
arms hanging limply at her sides, without a touch of color in her cheeks
or a coil of her black hair disarranged, without a sign of heat or
disturbance or passion in her face, John found Aida Calavera standing
within a few feet of him, her eyes seeking for his. She laid her fingers
upon his arm. The room was ringing with shouts of applause, in which
John unconsciously joined. Every one was trying to press forward toward
her. With her left hand she waved them back.

"If I have pleased you," she said, "I am so glad! I go now to rest for a
little time."

She tightened her clasp upon her companion's arm, and they passed out of
the picture-gallery and down a long corridor. John felt as if he were
walking in a dream. Volition seemed to have left him. He only knew that
the still, white hand upon his arm seemed like a vise burning into his
flesh.

She led him to the end of the corridor, through another door, into a
small room furnished in plain