ne does not call it domineering, but it is so. This special
creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her single share of
force. Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as this "other one" came to
her. He did not use the ballroom formula when he spoke to her. He said
in rather a low voice:

"Will you dance with me?"

"Yes," she answered.

Lord Dunholm and his wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable a pair
had never before danced together in their ballroom. Certainly no pair
had ever been watched with quite the same interested curiosity. Some
onlookers thought it singular that they should dance together at all,
some pleased themselves by reflecting on the fact that no other two
could have represented with such picturesqueness the opposite poles
of fate and circumstance. No one attempted to deny that they were an
extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one's eyes followed
them in spite of one's self.

"Taken together they produce an effect that is somehow rather amazing,"
old Lady Alanby commented. "He is a magnificently built man, you know,
and she is a magnificently built girl. Everybody should look like that.
My impression would be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that
neither of them had any particular character. That affair of the apple
was so silly. Eve has always struck me as being the kind of woman who,
if she lived to-day, would run up stupid bills at her dressmakers and
be afraid to tell her husband. That wonderful black head of Miss
Vanderpoel's looks very nice poised near Mount Dunstan's dark red one."

"I am glad to be dancing with him," Betty was thinking. "I am glad to be
near him."

"Will you dance this with me to the very end," asked Mount Dunstan--"to
the very late note?"

"Yes," answered Betty.

He had spoken in a low but level voice--the kind of voice whose tone
places a man and woman alone together, and wholly apart from all others
by whomsoever they are surrounded. There had been no preliminary speech
and no explanation of the request followed. The music was a perfect
thing, the brilliant, lofty ballroom, the beauty of colour and sound
about them, the jewels and fair faces, the warm breath of flowers in
the air, the very sense of royal presence and its accompanying state and
ceremony, seemed merely a naturally arranged background for the strange
consciousness each held close and silently--knowing nothing of the mind
of the other.

This was what was passing through th