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Updated: May 2, 2025
"I think I might go just for one dance, don't you?" Scott's pale eyes met hers with steady comradeship. "I think I shouldn't," he said. Eustace turned as if he had not heard and strolled to the door. He opened it, and at once the room was filled with the plaintive alluring strains of waltz-music. He stood and looked back. Dinah met the look, and suddenly she was on her feet.
The dancing had not yet ceased, and strains of waltz-music came to her where she stood, fitful, alluring, plaintive. They were playing "The Blue Danube." She listened to it as one in a dream, and while she listened the tears gathered in her eyes. How was it she had been so slow to understand? Would she ever make it up to him? She wondered how long he meant to keep her in suspense.
She was watching the dancers with an absorbed air, and did not notice his approach. He drew near, walking with a free swagger in time to the haunting waltz-music. Reaching her, he stopped and executed a sweeping bow, his hand upon his heart. "May I have the pleasure " She looked up with a start. Her eyes shone through her mask with a momentary irresolution as she bent in response to his bow.
"You helped me when my music was all adrift the other night: may I not help you find some of this?" "I wish you would play, Mr. Hayne." "I will play for you gladly, Miss Travers, but waltz-music is not my forte. Let me see what else there is here." And he began turning over the sheets on the stand.
You wonder what emotions are stimulated by the whirling dances, the rich dainties, the breath of the exotics, the waltz-music, the common contact, the emulation of dress, the unseasonable hours, the twice-breathed air, the everlasting drams. "I saw Florimonde going the round of her half dozen parties the other night," wrote a "looker-on in Venice" toward the close of the last season.
"It's in your eyes," she whispered, "come!" Night after night Martha Josselyn had sat there with the waltz-music in her ears, and her little feet, that had had one merry winter's training before the war, and many a home practice since with the younger ones, quivering to the time beneath her robes, and seen other girls chosen out and led away, young matrons, and little short-petticoated children even, taken to "excursionize" between the figures, while nobody thought of her.
From the ball-room ahead came waves of waltz-music; the ancient house was alive with colour and perfume, with the sounds of laughter and talk, lightly fretting, and breaking the swaying rhythms of the band.
Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her "good-bye" beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning waltz-music. The memory of the kiss abode with Theron. Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his brain its slave.
"Let us walk a little up the path into the woods," he said, "and get away from all this." "The further away the better," she answered bitterly, and he felt the shiver run through her again as she spoke. The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing platform rose again above all other sounds.
The distant waltz-music came softly in. And Scott pulled himself painfully up and sat on the end of the bed, panting heavily. Minutes passed ere he moved. Then at last very slowly he got up. He had recovered his breath.
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