we have passed another, and when we have ceased from all condemnation we
have progressed a little farther."

She made no response to this. In that sunwarmed silence the wind
whispered softly through the pines, a sound like the monotonous, musical
murmur of distant seas. "But you will forget all that," she said
suddenly. "You will go back to the world. I know."

He smiled invincibly. "How do you know?"

She tapped her breast lightly with her jewel-encrusted hand. "From
myself. Oh, how I have hated life since I came here, but now I love it
again, I want it." She threw wide her arms and smiled radiantly, but not
at him, rather at the vision of life her imagination conjured. "I want
to dance, dance, dance, I want to live."

"And you will dance for us here in the mountains before you go away?" he
asked, with interest. "Good dancing is very rare and very beautiful.
There are very few great dancers."

"Yes, only a few," she said briefly. He could not know that she was one
of them, of course, but nevertheless it piqued her vanity that he did
not divine it or take it for granted. She resolved then and there to
show him how she could dance, and as she decided this, a subtle, wicked
smile crept about her lips. Since he was so sure that he would never
return to the world, the world should come to him.

"But you haven't said yet that you would dance for us," he said.

"Yes," the same smile still lingering in her eyes and on her lips, "yes,