s. But by degrees I found myself watching
this girl, and more closely. Another dance began. She joined it with
another partner. But she seemed just as pleased with him as with her
former one. She would not let him pause to rest; she kept him dancing
all the time, her youth and freshness spoken in that gentle compelling.
I grew interested in her, even acutely so. She seemed to me like the
spirit of youth dancing over the body of Time. I resolved to know her. I
felt weary; I thought she might revive me. The dance drew to an end,
and I approached my hostess, pointed the girl out, and asked for an
introduction. Her name was Margot Magendie, I found, and she was an
heiress as well as a beauty.

I did not care. It was her humanity that drew me, nothing else.

But; strange to say, when the moment for the introduction arrived, and I
stood face to face with Miss Magendie, I felt an extraordinary shrinking
from her. I have never been able to understand it, but my blood ran
cold, and my pulses almost ceased to beat. I would have avoided her; an
instinct within me seemed suddenly to cry out against her. But it was
too late: the introduction was effected; her hand rested on my arm.

I was actually trembling. She did not appear to notice it. The band
played a valse, and the inexplicable horror that had seized me lost
itself in the gay music. It never returned until lately.

I seldom enjoyed a valse more. Our steps suited so perfectly, and her
obvious childish pleasure communicated itself to me. The spirit of youth
in her knocked on my rather jaded heart, and I opened to it. That was
beautiful and strange. I talked with her, and I felt myself younger,
ingenuous rather than cynical, inclined even to a radiant, though
foolish, optimism. She was very natural, very imperfect in worldly
education, full of fragmentary but decisive views on life, quite
unabashed in giving them forth, quite inconsiderate in summoning my
adherence to them.

And then, presently, as we sat in a dim corridor under a rosy hanging
lamp, in saying something she looked, with her great blue eyes, right
into my face. Some very faint recollection awoke and stirred in my mind.

"Surely," I said hesitatingly--"surely I have seen you before? It seems
to me that I remember your eyes."

As I spoke I was thinking hard, chasing the vagrant recollection that
eluded me.

She smiled.

"You don't remember my face?"

"No, not at all."

"Nor I yours. If we had seen eac