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 brook, all
the love, all the rapture, all the ghastly fatalism of that
heartbreaking song.

Bent as a bow her lithe figure curved now right, now left, to the
lilting cadence. Supple as a silken tube her slender body seemed to
drink up the fluid sound. No one could have sworn in that vague light