"Oh," she murmured in her heart, "it must be John."
She threw a shawl around her in passing the dressing room, and followed the boy outside. She saw no one when she got in the deserted doorway and was about to turn around and go back to the hall, for the lane looked very dark and forbidding at that late hour.
Just as she turned, a man with a dark cloak enveloping his whole form stepped out from the east corner of the building and, with a low bow, said softly:
"Forgive me, Miss Tyler, but the sight of heaven tempted me to try and draw out the angel, if but for one moment. I am lonesome, a stranger, and full of longing for the acquaintance of a sweet woman, be she sister or friend."
Ellen recognized the voice of her soldier acquaintance, and she involuntarily shrank back from him.
"Do not shrink from me, dear, sweet, gentle spirit. I am but a lonely, unhappy man, so near to a paradise of laughter, love and music, and yet unable to partake of one single element of all the glory that I see. You remember, even the angels are not ashamed to pity."
Just then someone came into the lane from the sidewalk, and Ellen hurriedly moved away to enter the deep doorway. As she turned, she felt a note thrust into her hand and then she was once more inside the safe precincts of the lighted, noisy building, and she put the note deep down into her pocket for future reference.
When she once more made her way into the dancing hall, she was surprised to find John Stevens dancing on the floor, and with no less a person than her dear friend Diantha. She wondered how she had missed him, but reflected that he must have come in while she was in the dressing room hunting her shawl.
"He will soon come to me," she whispered to herself, and waited impatiently for that coming.
But he did not come. Diantha and he danced together the first time and the second and the third time, and as Ellen had refused to dance, and was sitting on the side benches, she could easily follow them as the couple moved through the mazes of the quadrille and reel. Diantha's cheeks were glowing, and her eyes looked like blazing stars in the azure blue, while her lips were like the red balls on the winter wild rose bushes. And Ellen's sharp eyes noted that Diantha was not now wearing Charlie's ring. What was happening? Dian floated round with a rhythmical grace that was always so witching an accomplishment of her queenly beauty. Ellen watched and listened. She was too shrewd not to detect some meaning beneath all this throbbing excitement, and she knew that there was more than the usual effort to fascinate, in the manner of her friend Dian.