ied? And
worse than--

Out of her lips a little gasp of sound rang agonizingly.

And in that instant, by some trick-fashion of the dance, the
rollicking music stopped right off short in the middle of a note, the
lights went out, the dancers fled precipitously to their seats, and
out of the arbored gallery of the orchestra a single swarthy-faced
male singer stepped forth into the wan wake of an artificial moon, and
lifted up a marvelous tenor voice in one of those weird folk-songs of
the far-away that fairly tear the listener's heart out of his body--a
song as sinisterly metallic as the hum of hate along a dagger-blade; a
song as rapturously surprised at its own divinity as the first trill
of a nightingale; a song of purling brooks and grim, gray mountain
fortresses; a song of quick, sharp lights and long, low, lazy
cadences; a song of love and hate; a song of all joys and all
sorrows--and then death; the song of Sex as Nature sings it--the
plaintive, wheedling, passionate song of Sex as Nature sings it
yet--in the far-away places of the earth.

To no one else in that company probably did a single word penetrate.
Merely stricken dumb by the vibrant power of the voice, vaguely
uneasy, vaguely saddened, group after group of hoydenish youngsters
huddled in speechless fascination around the dark edges of the hall.

But to little Eve Edgarton's cosmopolitan ears each familiar gipsyish
word thus strangely transplanted into that alien room was like a call
to the wild--from the wild.

So--as to all repressed natures the moment of full self-expression
comes once, without warning, without preparation, without even
conscious acquiescence sometimes--the moment came to little Eve
Edgarton. Impishly first, more as a dare to herself than as anything
else, she began to hum the melody and sway her body softly to and fro
to the rhythm.

Then suddenly her breath began to quicken, and as one half hypnotized
she went clambering through the window into the ballroom, stood for an
instant like a gray-white phantom in the outer shadows, then, with a
laugh as foreign to her own ears as to another's, snatched up a great,
square, shimmering silver scarf that gleamed across a deserted chair,
stretched it taut by its corners across her hair and eyes, and with a
queer little cry--half defiance, half appeal--a quick dart, a long,
undulating glide--merged herself into the dagger-blade, the
nightingale, the grim mountain fortress, the gay mocking