with packing and disuse, toilets of
forgotten festivity revised with modern additions; garments in and out
of season--a fur-trimmed jacket and a tulle skirt, a velvet robe under
a pique sacque; fresh young faces beneath faded head-dresses, and mature
and buxom charms in virgin' white. The small space cleared for the
dancers was continually invaded by the lookers-on, who in files of three
deep lined the room.

As the master pushed his way to the front, a young girl, who had been
standing in the sides of a quadrille, suddenly darted with a nymph-like
quickness among the crowd and was for an instant hidden. Without
distinguishing either face or figure, Mr. Ford recognized in the
quick, impetuous action a characteristic movement of Cressy's; with an
embarrassing instinct that he could not account for, he knew she had
seen him, and that, for some inexplicable reason, he was the cause of
her sudden disappearance.

But it was only for a moment. Even while he was vaguely scanning
the crowd she reappeared and took her place beside her mystified
partner--the fascinating stranger of Johnny's devotion and Rupert's
dislike. She was pale; he had never seen her so beautiful. All that he
had thought distasteful and incongruous in her were but accessories of
her loveliness at that moment, in that light, in that atmosphere, in
that strange assembly. Even her full pink gauze dress, from which her
fair young shoulders slipped as from a sunset cloud, seemed only the
perfection of virginal simplicity; her girlish length of limb and the
long curves of her neck and back were now the outlines of thorough
breeding. The absence of color in her usually fresh face had been
replaced by a faint magnetic aurora that seemed to him half spiritual.
He could not take his eyes from her; he could not believe what he saw.
Yet that was Cressy McKinstry--his pupil! Had he ever really seen her?
Did he know her now? Small wonder that all eyes were bent upon her, that
a murmur of unspoken admiration, or still more intense hush of silence
moved the people around him. He glanced hurriedly at them, and was oddly
relieved by this evident participation in his emotions.

She was dancing now, and with that same pale restraint and curious
quiet that had affected him so strongly. She had not even looked in
his direction, yet he was aware by the same instinct that had at first
possessed him that she knew he was present. His desire to catch her eye
was becoming mingled