to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant
sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting
of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a
mental aversion.

"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"

Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her
for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams
or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky,
the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white
field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores--all these
things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter
night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then
she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old
sense of unreality.

"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot,"
she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me,
though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that I am
the Governor's daughter."

With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I
thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did not
appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to dwell
in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved him to
add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius Gershom.
That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of doubtful cast,
isn't it?"

She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like
the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he
watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree against
the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get away from
the thought of a bird when he looked at her.

"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"

She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for
mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing
is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza--or anything."

"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw
with relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was
obliged to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't
sit against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked
me,--but I don't like