Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes.
“I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, led by your father and Mrs. Melton.”
He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced it—charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else’s hair was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his felicity carry him too far into conjecture.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, as they joined the eddy circling around Mrs. Melton’s ballroom.
“So much; thanks to you.” Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at the joy of dancing. “I had almost forgotten how delicious it was.”
“More delicious than the studio, isn’t it?”
“You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche could do it—all light and movement and color. I should like to come out of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls’ throats. There is the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly heads! Isn’t that worth while?”
Odd’s eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda’s throat.
“Everything you do is worth while—from painting to dancing. You dance very well.”
The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display of which he recognized the gown’s quondam possessor, gave him a little pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue—the long fatigue of a weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge of the aloofness—the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago.