“Come,” he said.
Almost as if she were in a dream, Jean laid her hand lightly on his sleeve and he pulled aside the portière for her to pass through. Then, putting his arm about her, he swung her out on to the smooth floor of the salle.
They danced almost in silence. Somehow the customary small-change of ballroom conversation would have seemed irrelevant and apart. This dance—the Englishman had implied as much—was in the nature of a farewell. It was the end of their stolen day.
The band was playing Valse Triste, that unearthly, infinitely sad vision of Sibelius’, and the music seemed to hold all the strange, breathless ecstacy, the regret and foreboding of approaching end of which this first, and last, dance was compact.
It was over at last. The three final chords of the Valse—inexorable Death knocking at the door—dropped into silence, and with the end of the dance uprose the eager hum of gay young voices, as the couples drifted out from the salle in search of the buffet or of secluded corners in which to “sit out” the interval, according as the spirit moved them.
Jean and her partner, making their way through the throng, encountered Madame de Varigny on the arm of a handsome Bedouin Arab. For the fraction of a second her eyes rested curiously on Jean’s partner, and a gleam of something that seemed like triumph flickered across her face. But it was gone in an instant, and, murmuring some commonplace to Jean, she passed on.
“Who was that?”
The Englishman rapped out the question harshly, and Jean was struck by an unaccustomed note in his voice. It held apprehension, distaste; she could not quite analyse the quality.
“The Cleopatra, do you mean?” she said. “That was my chaperon, the Comtesse de Varigny. Why do you ask?” He gave a short, relieved laugh.
“No particular reason,” he returned with some constraint “She reminded me—extraordinarily—of someone I used to know, that’s all. Even the timbre of her voice was similar. It startled me for a moment.”