touched her fancy as it had never yet
been touched, awoke within her that latent vein of romance,
self-abnegation, supreme foolishness, which lurks in the nature of every
woman, be she chaste as ice and pure as snow.

The supper was long. It was past two o'clock, and the ballroom was
thinly occupied, when Mr. Smithson's party went there.

'You won't dance to-night, I suppose?' said Smithson, as Lesbia and he
went slowly down the room arm in arm. It was in a pause between two
waltzes. The wide window at the end was opened to the summer night, and
the room was delightfully cool. 'You must be horribly tired?'

'I am not in the least tired, and I mean to waltz, if anyone will ask
me,' replied Lesbia, decisively.

'I ought to have asked you to dance, and then it would have been the
other way,' said Smithson, with a touch of acrimony. 'Surely you have
dancing enough in town, and you might be obliging for once in a way,
and come and sit with me in the garden, and listen to the nightingales.'

'There are no nightingales after June. There is the Manola,' as the band
struck up, 'my very favourite waltz.'

Don Gomez was at her elbow at this moment

'May I have the honour of this waltz with you, Lady Lesbia?' he asked;
and then with a serio-comic glance at his stoutish friend, 'I don't
think Smithson waltzes?'

'I have been told that nobody can waltz who has been born on this side
of the Pyrenees,' answered Lesbia, withdrawing her arm from her lover's,
and slipping, it through the Spaniard's, with the air of a slave who
obeys a master.

Smithson looked daggers, and retired to a corner of the room glowering.
Were a man twenty-two times millionaire, like the Parisian Rothschild,
he could not find armour against the poisoned arrows of jealousy. Don
Gomez possessed many of those accomplishments which make men dangerous,
but as a dancer he was _hors ligne_; and Horace Smithson knew that there
is no surer road to a girl's fancy than the magic circle of a waltz.

Those two were floating round the room in the old slow legato step,
which recalled to Smithson the picture of a still more spacious room in
an island under the Southern Cross--the blue water of the bay shining
yonder under the starlight of the tropics, fire-flies gleaming and
flashing in the foliage beyond the open windows, fire-flies flashing
amidst the gauzy draperies of the dancers, and this same Gomez revolving
with the same slow languid grace, his arm encircling