erience, that she had been able
to keep undimmed the glow of her loveliness? It was not that she looked
young, he realized while he watched her, but that she looked ageless and
immortal, a creature of the spirit. While he gazed at her across the
violent whirl of colours in the ballroom, he remembered the evening star
shining silver white in the afterglow. Perhaps, who could tell, she may
have had the best that life had to give?

Making his way, with difficulty, through the throng, he followed
Corinna's protecting gaze, until he saw that it rested on Alice Rokeby,
who was wearing a dress that reminded him of wild hyacinths. For a
moment, the sight of this other woman's face, with its soft, hungry
eyes, and its expression of passive and unresisting sweetness, gave him
a start of surprise; and he found himself knocking awkwardly against one
of the dancers. Something had happened to her! Something had restored,
if only for an evening, the peculiar grace, the appealing prettiness,
too trivial and indefinite for beauty, which he recalled vividly now,
though for the last year or two he had almost forgotten that she ever
possessed it. Yes, something had changed her. She looked to-night as she
used to look before he went away, with a faint flush over her whole
face and those soft flower-like eyes, lifted admiringly to some man, to
any man except Herbert Rokeby. Then, as he disentangled himself from the
whirl, and went toward Corinna, she came a step or two forward, and left
John Benham and Alice Rokeby together.

"Everything is going well," she said; and he noticed, for the first
time, that her charming smile was tinged with irony, as if the humour of
the show, not the drama, were holding her attention. "I am having a
beautiful time."

He glanced over her shoulder. "What have you done to Mrs. Rokeby?"

She shook her head, with a laugh which, he surmised sympathetically, was
less merry than it sounded. "That is my secret. I have a magic you
know--but she looks well, doesn't she? I did her hair myself. If you
could have seen the way she had it arranged! That dress is very
becoming, I think, it makes her eyes look like frosted violets. Her
appearance is a success--but 'More brain, O Lord, more brain'!"

"Do you suppose that type will ever pass?" he asked.

She met his inquiring look with eyes that were golden in the coloured
light. "Do you suppose that women will ever mean more to men than pegs
on which to hang their sentimen