“Dancing is your expression,” he said.  “All of life is love and expression.”  And now there was a falling note in his voice which her ear was quick to catch.  Almost she cried: 

“Love!  And yet you live here alone!”

“Yes,” he went on, “we must have both.  They are as necessary to us as breath.  Without them—­” he stopped, evidently embarrassed, as if suddenly aware that he had been talking more to himself than to her and that in thus forgetting her, he had been more self-revealing than he would have wished.

She shook her head, plainly puzzled.  “But you are young,” she said, and stole another glance at him, adding a little shyly, “at least not very old, and I feel, I am sure that you too have a broken paw, but when that is well you will go back to your own country, to cities again.  You couldn’t stand it here always.”

He looked at her, an enigmatic smile on his lips.  “Couldn’t I?” he said.  Glancing again at her as he rose, he saw that she seemed weary, her lashes lay long on her pale cheek.  “Oh,” with a touch of compunction in his tone, “I have, as usual, talked far too much.  You are tired and we must go.  Jose,” lifting his voice, “as soon as you finish that game.”

“The Devil is indeed at your elbow,” cried Jose, flinging down his cards, “and prompts all you say.  We have just this moment finished a game and Gallito is the winner.”

Gallito smiled with bleak geniality.  “Has Jose been wise?” he asked, rising and replenishing the dying fire.

“Fairly so,” Seagreave smiled, “as far as he knows how to be.  He has been up to some of his antics, though.  They are beginning to say that this hillside is haunted.”

While Gallito talked to Seagreave and Mrs. Nitschkan and Jose argued over certain rules of the game they had been playing, Mrs. Thomas sidled up to Pearl and stood looking at her with the absorbed unconsciousness of an admiring child.

“I s’pose,” she began, swaying back and forth bashfully and touching the pink bow at her throat, “that it does look kind of queer to any one that’s so up on the styles as you are to see me wearing a pink bow at my neck and a crepe veil down my back?”

Pearl looked up in wearied surprise.  “It does seem queer,” she said indifferently.

“’Course I know it ain’t just citified,” Mrs. Thomas hastened to affirm; “but the veil and the bow together’s got a meaning that I think is real sweet.”  She waited a moment, almost pathetically anxious for Pearl to see the symbolism of her two incongruous adornments, but her listener was too genuinely bored and also too self-absorbed to make the attempt.  “It’s this,” said Mrs. Thomas, determined to explain.  “The pink bow kind o’ shows that I’m in the world again and,” bridling coquettishly, “open to offers, while this crepe veil shows that I ain’t forgot poor Seth in his grave and can afford to mourn for him right.”

But Pearl had not waited to hear all of these explanations.  Without a word to the rest of the parting guests, and with a mere inclination of the head toward Seagreave, she had slipped away.