ever went a
hair's breadth farther.

Thessalie looked on with flushed cheeks and parted lips, absorbed in
it all with the savant eyes of a professional. She also had once
coolly decided how far her beauty and talent and adolescent effrontery
could carry her gay disdain of man. And she had flouted him with
indifferent eyes and dainty nose uplifted--mocked him and his
conventions, with a few roubles in her dressing-room--slapped the
collective face of his sex with her insolent loveliness, and careless
smile.

Perhaps, as she sat there watching the fairy scene, she remembered her
ostrich and the German Embassy, and the aged Von-der-Goltz Pasha, all
over jewels and gold, peeping at her through thick spectacles under
his red fez.

Perhaps she thought of Ferez, too, and maybe it was thought of him
that caused her smooth young shoulders the slightest of shivers, as
though a harsh breeze had chilled her skin.

As for Dulcie, she was in the seventh heaven, thrilled with the dreamy
beauty of it all and the exquisite phantoms floating on the greensward
under her enraptured eyes.

No other thought possessed her save sheer delight in this revelation
of pure enchantment.

So intent, so still she became, leaning a little forward in her place,
that Barres found her far more interesting and wonderful to watch than
Mandel's cunningly contrived illusions in the artificial moonlight
below.

And now Titania's trumpets sounded from the woods, warning all of the
impending dawn. Suddenly the magic fairy moon vanished like the flame
of a blown-out candle; a faint, rosy light grew through the trees,
revealing an empty stage and a river on which floated a single swan.

Then, from somewhere, a distant cock-crow rang through the dawn. The
play was ended.

Two splendid orchestras were alternating on the vast marble terraces
of Hohenlinden, where hundreds of dancers moved under the white
radiance of a huge silvery moon overhead--another contrivance of
Mandel's--for the splendid sphere aglow with white fire had somehow
been suspended above the linden trees so that no poles and no wires
were visible against the starry sky.

And in its milky flood of light the dancers moved amid a wilderness of
flowers or thronged the supper-rooms within, where Teutonic
architectural and decorative magnificence reigned in one vast,
incredible, indigestible gastronomic apotheosis of German kultur.

Barres, for the moment, dancing with Thessalie, pressed h