up the art in her late visit, and was now waltzing with quiet grace
and precision, but he was surprised that her partner was far from being
equally perfect, and that after a few turns she stopped and smilingly
disengaged her waist from his arm. As she stepped back she turned with
unerring instinct to that part of the room where the master stood, and
raised her eyes through the multitude of admiring faces to his. Their
eyes met in an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone. It was an
attraction the more dangerous because unformulated--a possession without
previous pledge, promise, or even intention--a love that did not require
to be "made."

He approached her quietly and even more coolly than he thought possible.
"Will you allow me a trial?" he asked.

She looked in his face, and as if she had not heard the question but was
following her own thought, said, "I knew you would come; I saw you when
you first came in." Without another word she put her hand in his, and
as if it were part of an instinctive action of drawing closer to him,
caught with her advancing foot the accent of the waltz, and the next
moment the room seemed to slip away from them into whirling space.

The whole thing had passed so rapidly from the moment he approached
her to the first graceful swing of her full skirt at his side, that it
seemed to him almost like the embrace of a lovers' meeting. He had
often been as near her before, had stood at her side at school, and even
leaned over her desk, but always with an irritated instinct of reserve
that had equally affected her, and which he now understood. With her
conscious but pale face so near his own, with the faint odor of her hair
clinging to her, and with the sweet confusion of the half lingering,
half withheld contact of her hand and arm, all had changed. He did not