ing a step, a pirouette, while continuing to talk,
interrupting herself to hum some ballad air of which she would keep
the rhythm with a movement of the head; then suddenly she bent herself
double, and with a bound was at the other end of the studio.

"Now she is off!" said Felicia in a low voice to de Gery. "Watch! It is
worth your while; you are going to see the Crenmitz dance."

It was charming and fairy-like. Against the background of the immense
room lost in shadow and receiving almost no light save through the
arched glass roof over which the moon was climbing in a pale sky of
night blue, a veritable sky of the opera, the silhouette of the famous
dancer stood out all white, like a droll little shadow, light and
imponderable, which seemed rather to be flying in the air than springing
over the floor; then, erect upon the tips of her toes, supported in the
air only by her extended arms, her face lifted in an elusive pose, which
left nothing visible but the smile, she advanced quickly towards the
light or fled away with little rushes so rapid that you were constantly
expecting to hear a slight shivering of glass and to see her thus mount
backward the slope of the great moonbeam that lay aslant the studio.
That which added a charm, a singular poetry, to this fantastic ballet
was the absence of music, the sound alone of the rhythmical beat the
force of which was accentuated by the semi-darkness, of that quick and
light tapping not heavier on the parquet floor than the fall, petal by
petal, of a dahlia going out of bloom.

Thus it went on for some minutes, at the end of which they knew, by
hearing her shorter breathing, that she was becoming fatigued.

"Enough! enough! Sit down now," said Felicia. Thereupon the little white
shadow halted beside an easy chair, and there remained posed, ready
to start off again, smiling and breathless, until sleep overcame her,
rocking and balancing her gently without disturbing her pretty pose,
as of a dragon-fly on the branch of a willow dipping in the water and
swayed by the current.

While they watched her, dozing on her easy chair:

"Poor little fairy!" said Felicia, "hers is what I have had best and
most serious in my life in the way of friendship, protection, and
guardianship. Can you wonder now at the zig-zags, the erratic nature of
my mind? Fortunate at that, to have gone no further."

And suddenly, with a joyous effusion of feeling:

"Ah, Minerva, Minerva, I am very glad