ng to have a new sensation. You
are going to see the most beautiful woman in the world."

There was a little hush, and every one had turned towards the upper
end of the room. Some heavy curtains had been rolled aside, disclosing
a space, only a few yards square, which had been covered by a tightly
stretched drugget. There was a little curious anticipation amongst the
uninitiated. Then the comparative silence was broken by the strains
of a waltz from a violin, somewhere in the background. No one had
ever heard it before. There was a wilder, dreamier air with it,
than anything Waldteufel had ever written. And, while every one was
wondering whose music it could be, a woman glided out from behind a
screen, and stood for a second swaying herself slightly in the centre
of the drugget. Even that slight rhythmical motion of her body seemed
to bring her into perfect sympathy with the curious melody which was
filling the hushed room. And while the people watched her, already, in
varying degrees, under the spell of that curious fascination which her
personality and the exercise of her art seldom failed to excite, she
commenced to dance.

Long afterwards Paul de Vaux tried to describe in words, that dance,
and found that he could not, for there was indeed a charm beyond
expression or portrayal in the slow, almost languid movements, full of
infinite and inexpressible witchery. Every limb of her body and every
feature of her face followed, with a sort of effortless grace,
the movements of her feet. Yet the general effect of the whole was
suggestive of a sweet and dainty repose, voluptuous yet refined,
glowing with life, yet dreamily restful. In a certain sense her
physical movements, even her body itself, seemed merged and lost in
the artistic ideal created and born of her performance. And so it
was that he carried away that day no vivid thought-portrait of her
features, only a confused dream of a beautiful dusky face, rising
above a cloud of amber draperies, the lips slightly parted in a
wonderful smile, and a pair of heavily-lidded eyes, which, more than
once, had rested upon him, soft, dark, and lustrous. After all, it was
but a tangled web of memories, yet, such as it was, it became woven
into the pattern of his life, wonderfully soft and brilliant beside
some of those dark, gloomy threads which fate had spun for him.

The performance ended, as such performance should end, suddenly,
and without repetition. Her disappearance wa