"Who was your white companion? Cecil tells me that you said you had one. Bring him with you this evening; you'll need corroboration, I fear. And mostly I desire to know if you are well, and next I wish to
hear whether you did really find the lost city of Yhdunez."
A maid came to take the note to Dane's hotel, the Great Eastern, and Cecil Reeve looked up and laid aside his cigarette.
"Come on, Athalie," he said, "tell Peg to turn on one of those Peruvian dances."
Peggy Brooks at the piano struck a soft sensuous chord or two, but Francis Hargrave would not have it, and he pulled out the proper phonographic record and cranked the machine while Cecil rolled up the Beluch rugs.
The somewhat muffled air that exuded from the machine was the lovely Miraflores, gay, lively, languorous, sad by turns—and much danced at the moment in New York.
A new spring moon looked into the room from the west where like elegant and graceful phantoms the dancers moved, swayed, glided, swung back again with sinuous grace into the suavely delicate courtship of the dance.
The slender feet and swaying figure of Athalie seemed presently to bewitch the other couple, for they drew aside and stood together watching that exquisite incarnation of youth itself, gliding, bending, floating in the lilac-scented, lilac-tinted dusk under the young moon.
The machine ran down in the course of time, and Hargrave went over to re-wind it, but Peggy Brooks waved him aside and seated herself at the piano, saying she had enough of Hargrave.