heart-warming to hear them.

But they went off easily, and were soon dancing with the young
girls--sylphs as airy and agile as she had once been. And by degrees
she drew apart from the old ladies and their talk, which she hated to
seem, even to herself, to belong to, and presently found herself in the
extraordinary position of sitting alone. She leaned back in her chair,
and with eyes half shut, looked at the whirling couples, and dreamed of
the days--the dances--the youth--that were no more.

She saw, not this splendid saloon, but a shabby small room in an old
bush house--the walls not panelled with paintings by R.A.s and starred
with clusters of electric lights, but with wreaths of homely evergreens
and smelly kerosene lamps. And amid the happy throng that jostled for
room to dance there, a girl and a young man, newly betrothed,
anticipating an immortal paradise in each other's arms.

And she looked up, and saw Claud Dalzell watching her.

He was horribly aged--illness, it seemed--and had grown quite
white--that splendid lover with whom she had danced, as no girl here
knew how to dance, in the golden prime of everything! Their eyes met,
and there must have been in both pairs something that neither of them
had seen before. He crossed to her side at once, and she did not freeze
him when he got there.

"How do you do? I have been wondering if you were going to recognise
me."

"How do you do? I didn't know you were here. I never saw you until this
moment."

"I have been standing there for ten minutes."

"I did not notice. I was thinking--" "You were--deeply. I was trying to
guess what you were thinking of."

"I wonder, did you?"

"I wonder. Was it, by any chance"--he dropped his voice--"Five Creeks?"

She was quite startled and discomposed by this extraordinary
divination; having no time to decide how she would take it, she filled
the embarrassed moment with a laugh.

"Goodness! I'd no idea that my face was such a tell-tale. I believe I
was. That funny old room, with ridges in the floor, and the ceiling
nearly on your head--how DID we manage to dance in it?"

"Well, we did manage somehow, didn't we?"

They gazed at the figures wheeling past them, blankly unresponsive to
casual stares and smiles. They seemed to hear the rotten flood-gates,
shut so long ago, creak on their rusty hinges.

"Heard anything of the Urquharts lately?"

"Yes. Alice was married the other day--to a widower with fourteen
childre