“What do you ask?”

“The first dance and then the garden and the moon and you—­all to myself.”

Tony shook her head.  She was on guard.

“I shall want more than one dance and more than one partner.  I am afraid I shan’t have time for the moon and the garden to-night.  I adore dancing.  I never stop until the music does.”

A flash of exultancy leaped into his eyes.

“So?  I might have known you would adore dancing.  You shall have your fill.  You shall have many dances, but only one partner.  I shall suffice.  I am one of the best dancers in the world.”

“And evidently one of the vainest men,” coolly.

“What of it?  Vanity is good when it is not misplaced.  But I was not boasting.  I am one of the best dancers in the world.  Why should I not be?  My mother was Lucia Vannini.  She danced before princes.”  He might have added, “She was a prince’s mistress.”  It had been the truth.

“Oh!” cried Tony.  She had heard of Lucia Vannini—­a famous Italian beauty and dancer of three decades ago.  So Alan Massey was her son.  No wonder he was foreign, different, in ways and looks.  One could forgive his extravagances when one knew.

“Ah, you like that, my beauty?  You will like it even better when you have danced with me.  It is then that you will know what it is to dance.  We shall dance and dance and—­love.  I shall make you mine dancing, Toinetta mia.”

Tony shrank back from his ardent eyes and his veiled threat.  She was a passionate devotee of her own freedom.  She did not want to be made his or any man’s—­certainly not his.  She decided not to dance with him at all.  But later, when the violins began to play and Alan Massey came and stood before her, uttering no word but commanding her to him with his eyes and his out-stretched, nervous, slender, strong, artist hands, she yielded—­could scarcely have refused if she had wanted to.  But she did not want to, though she told herself it was with Lucia Vannini’s son rather than with Alan Massey that she desired to dance.

After that she thought not at all, gave herself up to the very ecstasy of emotion.  She had danced all her life, but, even as he had predicted, she learned for the first time in this man’s arms what dancing really was.  It was like nothing she had ever even dreamed of—­pure poetry of motion, a curious, rather alarming weaving into one of two vividly alive persons in a kind of pagan harmony, a rhythmic rapture so intense it almost hurt.  It seemed as if she could have gone on thus forever.

But suddenly she perceived that she and her partner had the floor alone, the others had stopped to watch, though the musicians still played on frenziedly, faster and faster.  Flushed, embarrassed at finding herself thus conspicuous, she drew herself away from Alan Massey.

“We must stop,” she murmured.  “They are all looking at us.”

“What of it?” He bent over her, his passionate eyes a caress.  “Did I not tell you, carissima Was it not very heaven?”