“What a ball-room!”
“Yes. Wish we could give a ball; but we only know about a dozen people. We’ve got to wait till we know enough at least for two sets of a quadrille.”
She was moving across the wide floor, holding her torch-like lamp high the better to illumine the great pale, silent emptiness. No longer hearing his footsteps echoing behind hers, she looked over her shoulder; whereupon he hurriedly joined her, without explaining why he had lagged.
“This,” she said, as turning to the left they passed from the ball-room into a small oval room the domed ceiling of which was all tenderly bepainted with Cupids and garlands–“this is almost my favorite.”
90She set down her lamp on a table of rose-tinged marble, and dropped for a minute on to a little rococo settee.
“The things in here we found just as you see them.”
“So I imagined.”
“All but the ornaments on the mantel.”
“Very astute in me; I divined that, too.”
“We liked it, so we left it. Pretty, ain’t it? Oh, beg pardon!” She blushed and looked at him sidelong, laughing. “That was a bad break! That came mighty near to being the forbidden question how you like it. All the same, it is pretty, is it not?”