tears--or was it only the glitter of ice?--on her round young cheek. And
while he looked, chilled, disapproving, unsympathetic, at the vivid
flower-like bloom of her face, there seemed to flow from her and envelop
him the spirit of youth itself--of youth adventurous, intrepid, and
defiant; of youth rejecting the expedient and demanding the impossible;
of youth eternally desirable, enchanting, and elusive. It was as if his
orderly, complacent, and tranquil soul had plunged suddenly into a bath
of golden air. Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to appear
dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon. He had no inclination for
a flirtation with the Governor's daughter--intuitively he felt that such
an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what she
wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, "there might be
trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was, she
evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed him
with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as
"wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly,
alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of
unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held
his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt. He felt
vaguely troubled. Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was
winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought. The
noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable
distance of empty space. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores
the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty
space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part
of the hidden country within his mind.

"You were at the ball," she burst out suddenly, as if she had been
holding back the charge from the beginning.