rmour of that self-contained young man.

"No, my dear," she said in her mocking voice, "you'll never persuade
me that Miltoun is going to catch on. 'Il est trop intransigeant'. Ah!
there's Babs!"

For the girl had come gliding by, her eyes wandering lazily, her lips
just parted; her neck, hardly less pale than her white frock; her face
pale, and marked with languor, under the heavy coil of her tawny hair;
and her swaying body seeming with each turn of the waltz to be caught by
the arms of her partner from out of a swoon.

With that immobility of lips, learned by all imprisoned in Society, Lily
Malvezin murmured:

"Who's that she's dancing with? Is it the dark horse, Bertie?"

Through lips no less immobile Bertie answered:

"Forty to one, no takers."

But those inquisitive bright eyes still followed Barbara, drifting in
the dance, like a great waterlily caught in the swirl of a mill pool;
and the thought passed through that pretty head:

"She's hooked him. It's naughty of Babs, really!" And then she saw
leaning against a pillar another whose eyes also were following those
two; and she thought: "H'm! Poor Claud--no wonder he's looking like
that. Oh! Babs!"

By one of the statues on the terrace Barbara and her partner stood,
where trees, disfigured by no gaudy lanterns, offered the refreshment of
their darkness and serenity.

Wrapped in her new pale languor, still breathing deeply from the waltz,
she seemed to Courtier too utterly moulded out of loveliness. To what
end should a man frame speeches to a vision! She was but an incarnation
of beauty imprinted on the air, and would fade out at a touch-like the
sudden ghosts of enchantment that came to one under the blue, and the
starlit snow of a mountain night, or in a birch wood all wistful golden!
Speech seemed but desecration! Besides, what of interest was there
for him to say in this world of hers, so bewildering and of such glib
assurance--this world that was like a building, whose every window was
shut and had a blind drawn down. A building that admitted none who had
not sworn, as it were, to believe it the world, the whole world, and
nothing but the world, outside which were only the nibbled remains of
what had built it. This, world of Society, in which he felt like one
travelling through a desert, longing to meet a fellow-creature.

The voice of Harbinger behind them said:

"Lady-Babs!"

Long did the punkahs waft their breeze over that brave-hued wheel