ng past in their partners' arms, noticing how tense was the
look on the brown face, and how the straight eyebrows--even blacker than
the smooth dark hair--were drawn together in expectant concentration.

Suddenly the door opened. The curtain-raiser was over. The drama of the
evening was about to begin.

It seemed wonderful that the band could keep presence of mind to go on
playing the "Merry Widow," instead of stopping short with a gasp and
crash of instruments, to start again with the "Tango Trance," _her_
dance in "Girls' Love."

She flashed into the ballroom like a dazzling fairy thing, all white and
gold and glitter. Because she knew that--so to speak--the curtain would
ring up for her entrance, and not an instant before, in the fondness of
her heart for young officers she had not even delayed long enough to
change the dress she wore as the Contessa Gaeta in the third act of
"Girls' Love." The musical comedy had been written for her. In it she
had made her first almost startling success two years ago in London,
where, according to the newspapers, all young men worth their salt, from
dukes down to draymen, had fallen in love with her. She had captured New
York, too, and now she and her company were rousing enthusiasm and
coining money on their tour of the larger Western cities.

The Gaeta dress looked as if it were made of a million dewdrops turned
to diamonds and sprinkled over a lacy spider-web; the web swathing the
tall and wandlike figure of Miss Billie Brookton in a way to show that
she had all the delicate perfections of a Tanagra statuette.

Despite the distraction of her entrance, followed by that of the little
gray lady engaged as her aunt, the musicians had the self-control to go
on with their "Merry Widowing," irrelevant as it now seemed. The dancers
went on dancing, also, though the dreaded dimness of extinction had
fallen upon even the brightest, prettiest girls, who tried to look
particularly rapturous in order to prove that nothing had happened. They
felt their partners' interest suddenly withdrawn from them and focussed
upon the radiance at the door. No use ignoring that Radiance, even if
one had in self-defence to pretend that it didn't matter much, and
wasn't so marvellously dazzling after all!

"There goes Mr. Doran to welcome her--of course!" said an Omallaha girl
lately back from New York. "I wonder if they really are engaged?"

"Why shouldn't they be?" her partner generously wanted to know