where long ago
they had met, talked together. Slowly, as one recalls a dream, it came
back to him. In some other life, vague, shadowy, he had married this
woman. For the first few years they had loved each other; then the gulf
had opened between them, widened. Stern, strong voices had called to him
to lay aside his selfish dreams, his boyish ambitions, to take upon his
shoulders the yoke of a great duty. When more than ever he had demanded
sympathy and help, this woman had fallen away from him. His ideals but
irritated her. Only at the cost of daily bitterness had he been able to
resist her endeavours to draw him from his path. A face--that of a
woman with soft eyes, full of helpfulness, shone through the mist of
his dream--the face of a woman who would one day come to him out of the
Future with outstretched hands that he would yearn to clasp.

"Shall we not dance?" said the voice beside him. "I really won't sit out
a waltz."

They hurried into the ball-room. With his arm about her form, her
wondrous eyes shyly, at rare moments, seeking his, then vanishing again
behind their drooping lashes, the brain, the mind, the very soul of the
young man passed out of his own keeping. She complimented him in her
bewitching manner, a delightful blending of condescension and timidity.

"You dance extremely well," she told him. "You may ask me for another,
later on."

The words flashed out from that dim haunting future. "Your dancing was
your chief attraction for me, as likely as not, had I but known?"

All that evening and for many months to come the Present and the Future
fought within him. And the experience of Nathaniel Armitage, divinity
student, was the experience likewise of Alice Blatchley, who had fallen
in love with him at first sight, having found him the divinest dancer
she had ever whirled with to the sensuous music of the waltz; of Horatio
Camelford, journalist and minor poet, whose journalism earned him a bare
income, but at whose minor poetry critics smiled; of Jessica Dearwood,
with her glorious eyes, and muddy complexion, and her wild hopeless
passion for the big, handsome, ruddy-bearded Dick Everett, who, knowing
it, only laughed at her in his kindly, lordly way, telling her with
frank brutalness that the woman who was not beautiful had missed her
vocation in life; of that scheming, conquering young gentleman himself,
who at twenty-five had already made his mark in the City, shrewd,
clever, cool-headed as a fox