on the
edge of shadow, would pop out of the dark next.

She was ready for something extraordinary, but now, when it came, she
was taken aback by it. It gave her a start, that toss of black hair,
that long, irregular, pale face whose scintillant, sardonic smile was
mercilessly upon the poor, inadequate picture-face fronting him. His
stoop above the rail was so abrupt that his long, lean back was almost
horizontal, yet even thus there was something elegant in the swing of
him--in the careless twist of his head, around, to speak to the woman
behind him. The light above struck blind on the glass in one eye, but
the other danced with a genial, a mad scintillation. The light of it
caught like contagion, and touched the merest glancer at him with the
spark of its warm, ironic mirth. The question which naturally rose to
Flora's lips--"Who in the world is that?"--she checked; why, she didn't
ask herself. She only felt as she followed Clara, trailing away across
the floor, that the interest of the evening which had promised so well,
beginning with the Chatworth ring, had been raised even a note higher.
Her restive fancy was beginning again. All the footlights of her little
secret stage were up.

Clara turned to the right, following a beckoning fan, and Flora,
dallying with her anticipation, reasoned that now they must circle the
room before they should face him--the interesting apparition. It was a
pilgrimage of which he on the other side was performing his half.
Perfunctorily talking from group to group, conscious now and again of
the lagging Clara or Harry, she could nevertheless keep a sly eye on the
stranger's equal progress. The flash of jet, and the voluble,
substantial shoulders of the lady so profusely introducing him, were an
assurance of how that pilgrimage would terminate, since it was Ella
Buller who was parading him. She even wondered before which of the
florid pictures at the far, other end of the room, as before a shrine,
the ceremony would take place.

She kept her eyes fixed on the paintings before her, and as she moved
down from one to another, and the voices of the approaching group drew
nearer, one separated itself from the general murmur, so clear, so
resonantly carried, so clean-clipped off the tongue, that it stood out
in syllables on the blur of sound which was Ella Buller's conversation.
It had color, that voice; it had a quality so sharp, so individual that
it touched her with a mischievous wonder tha