Her chin tilted ever so little as she answered swiftly.

"He who will not when he may,
When he will he shall have nay."

Before she had more than time to guess that he would really dare, the
officer leaned forward and kissed the girl's dusky cheek.

The color flamed into it. Jessie flung a quick, startled look at him.

"Kissing Day, Sleeping Dawn," he said, smiling.

Instantly she followed his lead. "Sleeping Dawn hopes that the Great
Spirit will give to the soldier of the Great Mother across the seas
many happy kissing days in his life."

"And to you. Will you dance with me?"

"Not to-day, thank you. I don't jig in public."

"I was speaking to Miss McRae and not to Sleeping Dawn, and I was
asking her to waltz with me."

She accepted him as a partner and they took the floor. The other
dancers by tacit consent stepped back to watch this new step, so
rhythmic, light, and graceful. It shocked a little their sense of
fitness that the man's arm should enfold the maiden, but they were
full of lively curiosity to see how the dance was done.

A novel excitement pulsed through the girl's veins. It was not the
kiss alone, though that had something to do with the exhilaration that
flooded her. Formally his kiss had meant only a recognition of
the day. Actually it had held for both of them a more personal
significance, the swift outreach of youth to youth. But the dance was
an escape. She had learned at Winnipeg the waltz of the white race.
No other girl at Faraway knew the step. She chose to think that the
constable had asked her because this stressed the predominance of her
father's blood in her. It was a symbol to all present that the ways of
the Anglo-Saxon were her ways.

She had the light, straight figure, the sense of rhythm, the
instinctively instant response of the born waltzer. As she glided over
the floor in the arms of Beresford, the girl knew pure happiness. Not
till he was leading her back to the counter did she wake from the
spell the music and motion had woven over her.

A pair of cold eyes in a white, bloodless face watched her beneath
thin black brows. A shock ran through her, as though she had been
drenched with icy water. She shivered. There was a sinister menace in
that steady, level gaze. More than once she had felt it. Deep in her
heart she knew, from the world-old experience of her sex, that the man
desired her, that he was biding his time with the patience and the
ruthlessness of a panth