Her white face stared mutely at him for a moment.
“I’m not up to your—golden journeys, Barry,” she said painfully, her lips quivering. “I’d have to be made all over again for that! You must go alone—or with some one that can help you. But—perhaps you won’t forget me, even if I was such a futile thing. When the sun sinks on your deserts, call me up out of the mirage, and we’ll plan together—as we used to, the overthrow of the old order of things.”
“We’ll follow the road together!” he insisted vigorously, “and sometime, a long while hence on the journey, I’ll wake you one morning with the shout that the Millennium has come; and you will come out, trailing yourself in morning-glories, to welcome the world at your gate!”
He drew back aghast at the look in her face.
Somebody back of them spoke Barry’s name inquiringly, as if not sure, in the dim light, that it was he. They turned around, and Isabel came toward them, amazingly changed.
She had discarded her splendid raiment, and appeared in a short, diaphanous garment that flared about her like bloody flames. Her black hair swept like a wind-blown scarf to her firm white heels.
Julie slipped suddenly back into the shadows, while Barry stared at Isabel in strange silence.
“I’m going to dance!” she announced. “You have often asked to see me, so come. Ah; to-night I am mad for wings! I have something afterwards to tell you—something of great importance.”
She plucked Barry by the sleeve and drew him on. Barry put out his hand to draw Julie along with him; but Isabel soon contrived in the crowd, to separate from him the indeterminedly following girl.
One end of the sala had been thrown into a softly radiant dusk. Under the streamers of one high lamp, Isabel stood and stretched out her arms like radii of light. Then in a whirl like a sun tumbling through the sky, she was in motion. Julie who had wandered up to the wide crowded circle of onlookers stood feverishly watching. Every movement of that mad, exultant whirl of limbs was an intolerable stab. Those feet twinkling like pearls out of the wind of motion looked as though they might kick down the stars. Julie herself had been one of the obstacles they had kicked out of their path. Yet she could not take her eyes away from this dusky sorceress spinning in fire this houri of terrible loves and hates.