“I knew you saw her,” said Sara Studleigh, “because I have happened to be near two or three people this evening when they caught their first sight of her.”
“What happens to them?” asked Donal Muir.
“They forget where they are,” she laughed, “and don’t say anything for a few seconds.”
“I should not want to forget where I am. It wouldn’t be possible either,” answered Donal. (“But that was it,” he thought. “For a minute I forgot.”)
One should not dance with one girl and talk to her about another. Wisely he led her to other subjects. The music was swinging through the air performing its everlasting miracle of swinging young souls and pulses with it, the warmed flowers breathed more perceptible scent, sweet chatter and laughter, swaying colour and glowing eyes concentrated in making magic. This beautiful young man’s pulses only beat with the rest—as one with the pulse of the Universe. Lady Lothwell acting for the Duchess was very kind to him finding him another partner as soon as a new dance began—this time her own daughter, Lady Kathryn.
Even while he had been tangoing with Sara Studleigh he had seen the girl with the eyelashes, whirling about with someone, and when he began his dance with Kathryn, he caught a glimpse of her at the other end of the room. And almost immediately Kathryn spoke of her.
“I don’t know when you will get a dance with Miss Lawless,” she said. “She is obliged to work out mathematical problems on her programme.”
“I have a setter who fixes his eyes on you and waits without moving until you look at him and then he makes a dart and you’re obliged to pat him,” he said. “Perhaps if I go and stand near her and do that she will take notice of me.”
“Take notice of him, the enslaving thing!” thought Kathryn. “She’d jump—for all her talk about lepers—any girl would. He’s TOO nice! There’s something about him too.”
Robin did not jump. She had no time to do it because one dance followed another so quickly and some of them were even divided in two or three pieces. But the thrill of the singing sound of the violins behind the greenery, the perfume and stately spaces and thousand candlelights had suddenly been lifted on to another plane though she had thought they could reach no higher one. Her whole being was a keen fine awareness. Every moment she was aware. After all the years—from the far away days—he had come back. No one had dreamed of the queer half abnormal secret she had always kept to herself as a child—as a little girl—as a bigger one when she would have died rather than divulge that in her loneliness there had been something she had remembered—something she had held on to—a memory which she had actually made a companion of, making pictures, telling herself stories in the dark, even inventing conversations which not for one moment had she thought would or could ever take place. But they had been living things to her and her one near warm comfort—closer, oh, so weirdly closer than kind, kind Dowie and dearly beloved Mademoiselle. She had wondered if the two would have disapproved if they had known—if Mademoiselle would have been shocked if she had realized that sometimes when they walked together there walked with them a growing, laughing boy in a swinging kilt and plaid and that he had a voice and eyes that drew the heart out of your breast for joy. At first he had only been a child like herself, but as she had grown he had grown with her—but always taller, grander, marvellously masculine and beyond compare. Yet never once had she dared to believe or hope that he could take form before her eyes—a living thing. He had only been the shadow she had loved and which could not be taken away from her because he was her secret and no one could ever know.