"To-night!"

"We docked at ten."

He turned away again. He had made his effect, and was content to leave
her to think it over.

Sally was silent. The significance of his words had not escaped her. She
realized that his presence there was a challenge which she must answer.
And yet it hardly stirred her. She had been fighting so long, and she
felt utterly inert. She was like a swimmer who can battle no longer and
prepares to yield to the numbness of exhaustion. The heat of the room
pressed down on her like a smothering blanket. Her tired nerves cried
out under the blare of music and the clatter of voices.

"Shall we dance this?" he asked.

The orchestra had started to play again, a sensuous, creamy melody which
was making the most of its brief reign as Broadway's leading song-hit,
overfamiliar to her from a hundred repetitions.

"If you like."

Efficiency was Bruce Carmyle's gospel. He was one of these men who
do not attempt anything which they cannot accomplish to perfection.
Dancing, he had decided early in his life, was a part of a gentleman's
education, and he had seen to it that he was educated thoroughly. Sally,
who, as they swept out on to the floor, had braced herself automatically
for a repetition of the usual bumping struggle which dancing at the
Flower Garden had come to mean for her, found herself in the arms of
a masterful expert, a man who danced better than she did, and suddenly
there came to her a feeling that was almost gratitude, a miraculous
slackening of her taut nerves, a delicious peace. Soothed and contented,
she yielded herself with eyes half closed to the rhythm of the melody,
finding it now robbed in some mysterious manner of all its stale
cheapness, and in that moment her whole attitude towards Bruce Carmyle
underwent a complete change.

She had never troubled to examine with any minuteness her feelings
towards him: but one thing she had known clearly since their first
meeting--that he was physically distasteful to her. For all his good
looks, and in his rather sinister way he was a handsome man, she had
shrunk from him. Now, spirited away by the magic of the dance, that
repugnance had left her. It was as if some barrier had been broken down
between them.

"Sally!"

She felt his arm tighten about her, the muscles quivering. She caught
sight of his face. His dark eyes suddenly blazed into hers and she
stumbled with an odd feeling of helplessness; realizing with a shock
that brough