s very important to-night," Nina heard the marchese saying
to the Princess Sansevero. "La Favorita is to appear in the Birth of
Venus. She does another dance first--a Spanish one, I think."

As he spoke, the ballet music had already begun, and the Spanish
_coryphees_ were twisting and bowing, and straightening their spines as
they danced to the beat of their castanettes. Then they moved aside for
the _ballerina_.

It may have been intended as a Spanish dance, or Eastern, or gypsy--but
it was more likely a dance of La Favorita's own imagination. She
appeared clad in a thin slip of transparent and jetted gauze. Upon her
feet were socks and ballet slippers of black satin. A black mask covered
the upper part of her face, and her black hair was drawn high and held
with a diamond bracelet; she wore a diamond collar, long diamond
earrings, and the gauze of her upper garment--which could hardly be
called a bodice--was held on one shoulder with a band of diamonds. For
the space of a second she faced the audience, standing still and rigid;
then, with a quiver, the rigidity was shattered! A serpent's coiling was
not more swift than the movement of her dazzling, glittering form, which
twirled and turned and bent, while the twinkling rapidity of her steps
was faster than the eye could follow. A twirl, another twirl, a
flash--and she was gone.

[Illustration: "FOR THE SPACE OF A SECOND SHE FACED THE AUDIENCE,
STANDING STILL AND RIGID"]

The _coryphees_, who had seemingly danced well before, were now so
awkward by comparison that Nina and Tornik laughed aloud.

"They look like cows," commented Tornik.

"Or nailed to the ground," Nina rejoined. She leaned forward, eager for
Favorita's reappearance.

To make a background for the second dance, the stage hands had moved in
folding wings or screens of sea green. The calciums had gradually been
turning to the blue of moonlight, and now, at the back of the stage,
Venus arose, veiled in a mist of foam.

Seeming scarcely to touch her feet to the ground, the dancer was a puff
of the foam itself, a living fragment of green and white spray. She
caught her arms full of the sea-colored gauze, like a great billow above
her head, and then with a swirl she bent her body and drew the
diaphanous film out sideways, like a wave that had run up on the sands.
Drawing it together again, she seemed to produce another breaker.

So perfectly was the fabric handled that it seemed exactly like the
spra