Downstairs, a few stray couples, clinging still to the fringes of pleasure, boston stormily to the strains of “Gipsy Love.” The massed flowers on the walls hang heavier and heavier yet. Madame has yawned twice, daintily, behind her Pompadour fan. As the last notes die away, Merle dashes for the doorway, dragging her partner in her wake.
“Peter!—she hasn’t gone yet, has she, grandmaman?” She succeeds in waylaying Peter, cloaked and reluctant, on her passage down the main staircase.
“You mustn’t go. I want you to dance the next with Stuart.” Merle’s tone conveys all she dares put into it of meaning and entreaty. Peter shakes her head, indicating Rose-Marie, inclined to be fractious.
“Leave her to me. Do go on, Peter.”
Peter wavers; the ballroom, after good-byes have been spoken and wraps adjusted, becomes doubly a place of enchantment, if only because etiquette debars from re-entering.
She looks at Stuart Heron.
And he, for his part, tries to trace the connection between a tall girl in a bronze evening-cloak, and a picture which has forced itself irrelevantly upon his mental vision: picture of a Cavalier emerging from some dark doorway; backward-floating plume, and mantle carelessly flung; swagger and smile expressive of all that lurked in his quest of love and hazard, and peradventure of hazardous love....
“Go on, Peter,” urges Merle. “You’ll like him.”
Peter hesitates no longer; tosses aside her cloak; and permits Stuart to escort her back to the regions of light whence she had thought to be self-banished. The band is crashing out in true Bacchanalian frenzy the last waltz of all, the waltz of their release. Twenty years before, and it would have been: “After the ball is over,” with its cloying suggestions of regret and sentiment; but modern youth requires something at once more abandoned and more discordant.
Stuart speaks: “She said I was going to like you.”