ensing with the advantages of a more
sumptuous setting, and the completeness of her triumph gave her an
intoxicating sense of recovered power. Not caring to diminish the
impression she had produced, she held herself aloof from the audience
till the movement of dispersal before supper, and thus had a second
opportunity of showing herself to advantage, as the throng poured slowly
into the empty drawing-room where she was standing.

She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed itself as
the circulation became general, and the individual comments on her
success were a delightful prolongation of the collective applause. At
such moments she lost something of her natural fastidiousness, and cared
less for the quality of the admiration received than for its quantity.
Differences of personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in
which her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had
approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning on Ned
Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of capturing for
himself.

Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs. Fisher, as
whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should break up the group
before Selden reached the threshold of the room. One or two of the men
wandered off in search of their partners for supper, and the others,
noticing Selden's approach, gave way to him in accordance with the tacit
freemasonry of the ball-room. Lily was therefore standing alone when he
reached her; and finding the expected look in her eye, he had the
satisfaction of supposing he had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen
as it rested on him, for even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily
felt the quicker beat of life that his nearness always produced. She
read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her
triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she
cared to be beautiful.

Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in silence,
and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but against the tide
which was setting thither. The faces about her flowed by like the
streaming images of sleep: she hardly noticed where Selden was leading
her, till they passed through a glass doorway at the end of the long
suite of rooms and stood suddenly in the fragrant hush of a garden.
Gravel grated beneath their feet, and about them was the transparent
dimness of a midsummer