Willard stopped abruptly. "What do you know about that"; a voice was saying, in the rear of the dressing-room; he stiffly refrained from turning to see whose, "Judith is dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan!"
Judith was dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan. It was social history already, accepted as such, and not further discussed, even by Willard. But many epoch-making events are not even so much discussed, they look so simple on the face of them. We cross a room, and change the course of our lives by crossing it, and few people even observe that we have crossed the room.
If Judith had affected the course of her life materially by crossing the room to the strange boy, she did not seem to be thinking of it just now. She was not thinking at all. She was only dancing, following her partner's erratic course quite faithfully, and quite intent on doing so; feeling every beat of the music, and showing it, pink-cheeked and sparkling eyed, and pleasantly excited, but nothing more.
The wistful and dreamy look was gone from her eyes, and her half-formed desire for something to happen this evening, something that had never happened before, was gone from her, too. She felt content with whatever was going to happen, and deeply interested in it, and particularly interested in dancing.
They had danced almost in silence, rather a grim silence at first, but now that the boy could let the music carry him with it, and was beginning to trust it, too, the silence was comfortable. But the few words he managed to say were worth listening to and answering, not to be dreamed through and ignored, like Willard's. His voice was not as she remembered it, and that was interesting, too, deeply significant, though she could not have said why. Everything seemed unaccountably interesting to-night.
"I thought it was louder," she said, "or higher—or something."
"What?"
"Your voice."
It was quite husky and low, and he pronounced a word here and there with a brogue like Norah's, only pleasanter, with a kind of singing sound. It was never the word you expected. You had to watch for it. She could hear it now.
"Won't you please tell me who you are?"