Finally a compromise was effected. Elithe could go and look on, but not dance, and was to leave at eleven sharp.
“Not one little dance with me?” Paul said, taking Miss Hansford by the arm and whirling her round until she unconsciously fell into a step once familiar to her, but buried years ago when she laid aside her white dress and red ribbons and burned her long curls.
“Stop—stop,” she cried. “There’s Miss Dunton looking at us. I shall be churched. I know I shall.”
“Hardly,” Paul answered with a laugh as he released her and again asked permission for one dance with Elithe.
Miss Hansford was firm. She had given her ultimatum, and Paul and Elithe were obliged to accept it. It was after nine when they entered the ball-room at the hotel, where Elithe was at once besieged with suitors.
“I am not going to dance. I’m here to look on,” she said to them all, and then took a seat where she had a full view of the gay scene.
It was harder to look on than she had imagined, for she was fond of dancing, and nothing could be more inspiriting than the music hired for the occasion, as it was the ball of the season. She had joined in the grand march with Paul, who, at her request, tried a waltz or two and then sat down beside her, while with her head and hands and feet she kept time to the lively strains and studied carefully the step of a waltz she had never seen before. Every few minutes she asked Paul what time it was, saying: “I mustn’t be a minute late, you know.”
At last Paul laid his open watch in her lap, telling her to keep the time herself, which she did religiously, and at exactly eleven o’clock she left the ball-room with Paul. It was a bright moonlight night, and when they were on the broad avenue at a little distance from the hotel Elithe stopped suddenly and exclaimed: “This is glorious, and I feel as if I could fly. I did not promise not to dance outdoors with nobody in sight but the moon. I can do that step. I know I can. Look!”
Striking an attitude, she began a series of pirouettes and evolutions, and turnings and twistings, now with her head on one side, now on the other, her hands sometimes thrown up and sometimes grasping her dress, while she whistled the accompaniment in notes clear and shrill as a boy’s. Paul was entranced as he watched the little whirling figure whose white skirts brushed against him and then went sweeping off in front, making in the moonlight fantastic but graceful shadows on the smooth pavement.
“Can you do it?” she said at last, stopping in front of him and looking at him with a face which would have moved any man had he been twenty times engaged, and twenty times more in love with his betrothed than Paul was.