Then he had to walk rationally back to the house, and change his things, for the notes of a waltz suddenly sprang up. A big hall with a polished floor was cleared for dancing, fruit and ice were being handed round, and nobody cared very much for the thunderstorm.
Guy, looked out for the harebell blue gown, which he always associated with Florella. It did not occur to him that she had very few smart frocks at Moorhead. He asked her to dance, and it was not till they had spun two or three times round the dark polished floor that his heart began to throb and flutter, and that it struck him that this was probably the sort of “exertion” forbidden to him. He felt miserable, and wished, not for the first time, that he had never spoken of his troubles. It was more endurable, locked up as it were in the cupboard in the wall, than now when it mixed itself up with his ordinary life. But the slight discomfort could not signify, the chief thing was to conceal it. He would go on dancing, and presently get some champagne. Florella, however, stopped of her own accord in the deep recess of a window.
“I’m not a very good dancer,” she said, in her composed way. “You know I haven’t been out very much yet.”
“Don’t you care for it?” said Guy, rather breathlessly.
“I like it a little,” she said; “and it is lovely to watch, especially on a dark floor—crumb-cloths have no beauty.”
The light was streaming in under the storm-clouds through the narrow windows in dull yellowish rays, the flying figures passed in and out of the shadow, against a background of polished oak.
“I suppose,” said Guy, “that you like painting better than dancing?”
“Oh, well,” said Florella, in a tone that showed her to be Cosy’s sister; “to say that is either a truism or a very priggish remark. You might as well ask if one liked strawberry ice best or poetry. But I like looking on best of all—feeling pictures.”
“Do tell me what you mean?” said Guy, eagerly.
Florella was always impelled to talk, or, perhaps more truly, to think by Guy. She was drifting again into talk that belonged only to him, and that she would not have held with any one else.