Perhaps she thought of Ferez, too, and maybe it was thought of him that caused her smooth young shoulders the slightest of shivers, as though a harsh breeze had chilled her skin.
As for Dulcie, she was in the seventh heaven, thrilled with the dreamy beauty of it all and the exquisite phantoms floating on the greensward under her enraptured eyes.
No other thought possessed her save sheer delight in this revelation of pure enchantment.
So intent, so still she became, leaning a little forward in her place, that Barres found her far more interesting and wonderful to watch than Mandel’s cunningly contrived illusions in the artificial moonlight below.
And now Titania’s trumpets sounded from the woods, warning all of the impending dawn. Suddenly the magic fairy moon vanished like the flame of a blown-out candle; a faint, rosy light grew through the trees, revealing an empty stage and a river on which floated a single swan.
Then, from somewhere, a distant cock-crow rang through the dawn. The play was ended.
Two splendid orchestras were alternating on the vast marble terraces of Hohenlinden, where hundreds of dancers moved under the white radiance of a huge silvery moon overhead—another contrivance of Mandel’s—for the splendid sphere aglow with white fire had somehow been suspended above the linden trees 375 so that no poles and no wires were visible against the starry sky.
And in its milky flood of light the dancers moved amid a wilderness of flowers or thronged the supper-rooms within, where Teutonic architectural and decorative magnificence reigned in one vast, incredible, indigestible gastronomic apotheosis of German kultur.
Barres, for the moment, dancing with Thessalie, pressed her fingers with mischievous tenderness and whispered:
“The moonlit way once more with you, Thessa! Do you remember our first dance?”