"Where did you go to school?"
"At Elm Court School, near New York. For just a year."
He shook his head with an air of relief. "Never was engaged to anybody's roommate there.... But if you'd rather not have my background painted——"
"Much rather not," said the girl gaily. "Why, half the romance, I mean the fun, of meeting people abroad is not knowing anything about them beforehand."
The music was beginning again. Unwillingly the remembrance of the outer world beat back into Billy's mind. Unhappily he became aware that the room appeared blackened with young men in evening clothes, staring ominously his way.
Squarely he stood in front of the girl. "I think this is the encore to our dance," he told her with a little smile.
She shook her pretty head laughingly at him—and then yielded to his clasping hands. "But we must dance back to the Evershams," she demurred. "It is time for us to go to our concert."
But Billy had no intention of relinquishing her before the music ceased. It was a one step, and it carried them with it in a gaiety of rhythm to which the girl gave herself with the light-hearted abandon of a romping child. Her light feet seemed scarcely to brush the floor; the delicate flush of her cheeks deepened with the stirring blood; her lips parted breathlessly over white little teeth, and when her eyes, intensely blue, met Billy's, the smile in them quickened in sparkling radiance. She was the very spirit of the dance; she was Youth and Joy incarnate. And the heart behind the white shirt bosom near which her fairy hair was floating began to pitch and toss like a laboring ship in the very devil of a sea.
"I think I'll go up the Nile again," said Billy irrelevantly.
She laughed elfishly at him, her head swaying faintly with the rhythm.