He looked up at me.
"Memories . . ." he said. "They're strange things, George. Those little dances. . . . What visions they recall!"
"May they be only the pleasant ones," I answered, inadequately.
"Ah! That's the trouble! I wouldn't mind the others. One can shake them off. It's the pleasant ones which stick. . . . You feel that so many things might have been different—if only you had known. . . . The happy moment, the great joy—which lasted only an instant—and ended in nothing. . . ."
He hesitated, as if he had half-turned one of the hidden pages of his past life and dreaded to read the message written by a relentless fate.
"There was a minuet," he said, at last. "It went like this."
He rose to his feet again and began softly humming to himself. With a courtly, old-fashioned grace, he went through the steps, his eyes half-closed and his hands extended as if towards some invisible partner. He was in another world, another time, where the mad and feverish jazzing of to-day was unknown. As he turned and pirouetted I almost heard the faint swish of the crinoline and the murmur of some hidden and distant orchestra.
For nearly ten minutes he held Molly and myself silent and entranced, and then he suddenly stopped, bowed to his dream-partner,—and returned to the world of grim reality.
"I'm an old fool . . ." he said. "Over fifty years ago. . . . She may be dead by now."
And, as he mused, so the story of romance slowly unfolded itself. His married life had not been happy. The oldest sin on earth had been committed. He had married, not the girl he loved, but the girl whom his parents in their worldly wisdom had chosen. Money? Partly—for he was unable to support a wife without some help from his father. But, mainly, because life for the young was ordered differently in those days. One was told to do a thing and, in the end—one did it.