ed with fixed, glassy eyes,
or who frowned with determination to do their duty or to die, and
seemed to expect the latter, or who were pale with the apprehension of
collision, or who made visible their anxiety to breathe through the nose
and look pleased at the same time, these two floated and smiled
easily upon life. Three or four steep steps made the portly and
cigarette-smoking Meredith pant like an old man, but a dance was a
cooling draught to him. As for the little Marquise--when she danced, she
danced away with all those luckless hearts that were not hers already.
The orchestra launched the jubilant measures of the deux-temps with a
torrent of vivacity, and the girl's rhythmic flight answered like a sail
taking the breeze.

There was one heart she had long since won which answered her every
movement. Flushed, rapturous, eyes sparkling, cheeks aglow, the small
head weaving through the throng like a golden shuttle--ah, did she know
how adorable she was! Was Tom right: is it the attainable unattainable
to one man and given to some other that leaves a deeper mark upon him
than success? At all events the unattainable was now like a hot sting
in the heart, but yet a sting more precious than a balm. The voice of
Brainard Macauley broke in:

"A white brow and a long lash, a flushing cheek and a soft eye, a voice
that laughs and breaks and ripples in the middle of a word, a girl you
could put in your hat, Mr. Harkless--and there you have a strong man
prone! But I congratulate you on the manner your subordinates operate
the 'Herald' during your absence. I understand you are making it a
daily."

Macauley was staring at him quizzically, and Harkless, puzzled, but
without resentment of the other's whimsey, could only decide that the
editor of the Rouen "Journal" was an exceedingly odd young man. All at
once he found Meredith and the girl herself beside him; they had stopped
before the dance was finished. He had the impulse to guard himself from
new blows as a boy throws up his elbow to ward a buffet, and, although
he could not ward with his elbow, for his heart was on his sleeve--where
he began to believe that Macauley had seen it--he remembered that he
could smile with as much intentional mechanism as any wornout rounder of
afternoons. He stepped aside for her, and she saw what she had known but
had not seen before, for the thickness of the crowd, and this was that
he limped and leaned upon his stick.

"Do let me thank y