"Shall we not dance?" said the voice beside him. "I really won't sit
out a waltz."

They hurried into the ball-room. With his arm about her form, her
wondrous eyes shyly, at rare moments, seeking his, then vanishing
again behind their drooping lashes, the brain, the mind, the very soul
of the young man passed out of his own keeping. She complimented him
in her bewitching manner, a delightful blending of condescension and
timidity.

"You dance extremely well," she told him. "You may ask me for
another, later on."

The words flashed out from that dim haunting future. "Your dancing
was your chief attraction for me, as likely as not, had I but known?"

All that evening and for many months to come the Present and the
Future fought within him. And the experience of Nathaniel Armitage,
divinity student, was the experience likewise of Alice Blatchley, who
had fallen in love with him at first sight, having found him the
divinest dancer she had ever whirled with to the sensuous music of the
waltz; of Horatio Camelford, journalist and minor poet, whose
journalism earned him a bare income, but at whose minor poetry critics
smiled; of Jessica Dearwood, with her glorious eyes, and muddy
complexion, and her wild hopeless passion for the big, handsome,
ruddy-bearded Dick Everett, who, knowing it, only laughed at her in
his kindly, lordly way, telling her with frank brutalness that the
woman who was not beautiful had missed her vocation in life; of that
scheming, conquering young gentleman himself, who at twenty-five had