The place was but dimly illumined by the flare of the many lights below—two great crystal candelabra that hung at each end being left unlighted. Under one of these was a settee which Saltash drew forward to the balcony.
"No one will disturb us here," he said. "We can smoke in peace."
He offered her his cigarette-case, but she refused it nervously, sitting down in a corner of the settee in the crouched attitude of a frightened creature seeking cover. The band was playing in the salon now, and people were beginning to crowd in.
Saltash leaned back in his corner and smoked. His eyes went to and fro ceaselessly, yet the girl beside him was aware of a scrutiny as persistent as if they never left her. She sat in silence, clasping and unclasping her hands, staring downwards at the shining stage.
Very soon the salon was full of people, and the lights were lowered there while on the stage only a single shaft of blinding violet light remained, shooting downwards from the centre. Toby's eyes became fixed upon that shaft of light. She seemed to have forgotten to breathe.
The band had ceased to play. There fell a potent silence. The multitude below sat motionless, as if beneath a spell. And then she came.
No one saw her coming. She arrived quite suddenly as though she had slid down that shaft of light. And she was there before them dancing, dancing, like a winged thing in the violet radiance. Not a sound broke the stillness save a single, wandering thread of melody that might have come from the throat of a bird, soft, fitful, but half-awake in the dawning.
The violet light was merging imperceptibly into rose—the unutterable rose of the early morning. It caught the dancing figure, and she lifted her beautiful face to it and laughed. The gauzy scarf streamed out from her shoulders like a flame, curving, mounting, sinking, now enveloping the white arms, now flung wide in a circle of glittering splendour.
A vast breath went up from the audience. She held them as by magic—all save one who leaned back in his corner with no quickening of the pulses and watched the girl beside him sitting motionless with her blue eyes wide and fixed as though they gazed upon some horror from which there was no escape.
The rose light deepened to crimson. She was dancing now in giddy circles like a many-coloured moth dazzled by the dawn. The melody was growing. Other bird-voices were swelling into sound—a wild and flute-like music of cadences that came and went—elusive as the laughter of wood-nymphs in an enchanted glade. And every one of that silent crowd of watchers saw the red light of dawn breaking through the trees of a dream-forest that no human foot had ever trod.