ccent of the waltz, and the next
moment the room seemed to slip away from them into whirling space.

The whole thing had passed so rapidly from the moment he approached
her to the first graceful swing of her full skirt at his side, that it
seemed to him almost like the embrace of a lovers' meeting. He had
often been as near her before, had stood at her side at school, and even
leaned over her desk, but always with an irritated instinct of reserve
that had equally affected her, and which he now understood. With her
conscious but pale face so near his own, with the faint odor of her hair
clinging to her, and with the sweet confusion of the half lingering,
half withheld contact of her hand and arm, all had changed. He did not
dare to reflect that he could never again approach her except with this
feeling. He did not dare to think of anything; he abandoned himself to
the sense that had begun with the invasion of her hair-bound myrtle in
the silent school-room, and seemed to have at last led her to his arms.
They were moving now in such perfect rhythm and unison that they seemed
scarcely conscious of motion. Once when they neared the open window he
caught a glimpse of the round moon rising above the solemn heights of
the opposite shore, and felt the cool breath of mountain and river sweep
his cheek and mingle a few escaped threads of her fair hair with
his own. With that glimpse and that sensation the vulgarity and the
tawdriness of their surroundings, the guttering candles in their
sconces, the bizarre figures, the unmeaning faces seemed to be whirled
far into distant space. They were alone with night and nature; it was
they who were still; all else had receded in a vanishing perspective of
dull reality, in which they had no part.

Play on, O waltz of Strauss! Whirl on, O love and youth! For you cannot
whirl so swiftly but that this receding world will return again with
narrowing circle to hem you in. Faster, O cracked clarionet! Louder,
O too brazen bassoon! Keep back, O dull and earthy environment, till
master and pupil have dreamed their foolish dream!

They are in fancy alone on the river-bank, only the round moon above
them and their linked shadows faintly fluttering in the stream. They
have drawn so closely together now that her arm is encircling his neck,
her soft eyes uplifted like the moon's reflection and drowning into his;
closer and closer till their hearts stop beating and their lips have met
in a first kiss.