"All that you tell me," she sighed, "makes the enterprise seem easier. It is, after all, rather like the lioness and the mouse, isn't it?"
The prince made no reply, but upon his lips there lingered a faintly incredulous smile. The woman by his side leaned back in her place. She had the air of accepting a challenge.
"After supper," she said, "we will see!"
A single chord of music in a minor key floated across the room, soft at first, swelling later into a volume of sound, then dying away and ceasing altogether. John, standing momentarily alone in a corner of the picture-gallery, found it almost incredible that this wildly hilarious throng of men and women could so soon, and without a single admonitory word, break off in the midst of their conversation, stifle their mirth, almost hold their breath, in obedience to this unspoken appeal for silence. Every light in the place was suddenly extinguished. There remained only the shaded lamps overhanging the pictures.
Not a whisper was heard in the room. John, looking around him in astonishment, was conscious only of the half-suppressed breathing of the men and women who lined the walls, or were still standing in little groups at the end of the long hall. Again there came the music, this time merged in a low but insistent clamor of other instruments. Then, suddenly, through the door at the farther end of the room came a dimly seen figure in white. The place seemed wrapped in a mystical twilight, with long black rays of deeper shadow lying across the floor. There was a little murmur of tense voices, and then again silence.
For a few moments the figure in white was motionless. Then, without any visible commencement, she seemed suddenly to blend into the waves of low, passionate music. The dance itself was without form or definite movement. She seemed at first like some white, limbless spirit, floating here and there across the dark bars of shadow at the calling of the melody. There was no apparent effort of the body. She was merely a beautiful, unearthly shape. It was like the flitting of a white moth through the blackness of a moonless summer night.
The impression it made upon John was indescribable. He watched with straining eyes, conscious of a deep sense of pleasure. Here was something appealing insistently to his love of beauty pure and simple; a new joy, a new grace, something which thrilled him and which left no aftermath of uneasy thoughts.
The music suddenly faded away into nothing. With no more effort than when she had glided into her poem of movement, the dancer stood in a pose of perfect stillness. There were a few moments of tense silence. Then came a crash of chords, and the slender white figure launched into the dance.
Her motions became more animated, more human. With feet which seemed never to meet the earth, she glided toward the corner where John was standing. He caught the smoldering fire in her eyes as she danced within a few feet of him. He felt a catch in his breath. Some subtle and only half-expressed emotion shook his whole being, seemed to tear at the locked chamber of his soul.