“Do you know,” he ventured smilingly, “that your skirts and slippers are soaking wet?”
“I don’t care. Isn’t this June night heavenly?”
She glanced across at the lighted house. “It’s so hot and noisy in there; one dances only with discomfort. A distaste for it all sent me out on the terrace. Then I walked on the lawn. Then I beheld you!... Am I interrupting your work, monsieur? I suppose I am.” She looked up at him naïvely.
He said something polite. An odd sense of having seen her somewhere possessed him now. From the distant house came the noisy American music of a two-step. With charming grace, still inspecting him out of her dark eyes, the girl began to move her pretty feet in rhythm with the music.
“Shall we?” she inquired mischievously.... “Unless you are too busy——”
The next moment they were dancing together there on the wet lawn, under the high lustre of the moon, her fresh young face and fragrant figure close to his.
During their second dance she said serenely:
“They’ll raise the dickens if I stay here any longer. Do you know the Comte d’Eblis?”
“The Senator? The numismatist?”
“Yes.”