But to little Eve Edgarton’s cosmopolitan ears each familiar gipsyish word thus strangely transplanted into that alien room was like a call to the wild—­from the wild.

So—­as to all repressed natures the moment of full self-expression comes once, without warning, without preparation, without even conscious acquiescence sometimes—­the moment came to little Eve Edgarton.  Impishly first, more as a dare to herself than as anything else, she began to hum the melody and sway her body softly to and fro to the rhythm.

Then suddenly her breath began to quicken, and as one half hypnotized she went clambering through the window into the ballroom, stood for an instant like a gray-white phantom in the outer shadows, then, with a laugh as foreign to her own ears as to another’s, snatched up a great, square, shimmering silver scarf that gleamed across a deserted chair, stretched it taut by its corners across her hair and eyes, and with a queer little cry—­half defiance, half appeal—­a quick dart, a long, undulating glide—­merged herself into the dagger-blade, the nightingale, the grim mountain fortress, the gay mocking brook, all the love, all the rapture, all the ghastly fatalism of that heartbreaking song.

Bent as a bow her lithe figure curved now right, now left, to the lilting cadence.  Supple as a silken tube her slender body seemed to drink up the fluid sound.  No one could have sworn in that vague light that her feet even so much as touched the ground.  She was a wraith!  A phantasy!  A fluctuant miracle of sound and sense!

Tremulously the singer’s voice faltered in his throat to watch his song come gray-ghost-true before his staring eyes.  With scant restraint the crowd along the walls pressed forward, half pleasure-mad, to solve the mystery of the apparition.  Abruptly the song stopped!  The dancer faltered!  Lights blazed!  A veritable shriek of applause went roaring to the roof-tops!

And little Eve Edgarton in one wild panic-stricken surge of terror went tearing off through a blind alley of palms, dodging a cafe table, jumping an improvised trellis—­a hundred pursuing voices yelling:  “Where is she?  Where is she?”—­the telltale tinsel scarf flapping frenziedly behind her, flapping—­flapping—­till at last, between one high, garnished shelf and another it twined its vampirish chiffon around the delicate fronds of a huge potted fern!  There was a jerk,—­a blur,—­a blow, the sickening crash of fallen pottery—­And little Eve Edgarton crumpled up on the floor, no longer “colorless” among the pale, dry, rainbow tints and shrill metallic glints of that most wondrous scene.

Under her crimson mask, when the rescuers finally reached her, she lay as perfectly disguised as even her most bashful mood could have wished.

All around her—­kneeling, crowding, meddling, interfering—­frightened people queried:  “Who is she?  Who is she?” Now and again from out of the medley some one offered a half-articulate suggestion.  It was the hotel proprietor who moved first.  Clumsily but kindly, with a fat hand thrust under her shoulders, he tried to raise her head from the floor.  Barton himself, as the most recently returned from the “Dark Valley,” moved next.  Futilely, with a tiny wisp of linen and lace that he found at the girl’s belt, he tried to wipe the blood from her lips.