She was certainly tired—­for her—­and the fact struck her that she had not danced for a long time.  She had shirked balls, having only too many entertainments to choose from.  She thought it likely that she would be stiff and heavy on her feet from want of practice—­a horrible idea to her, who had once danced like a feather in the wind.  A good stone had been added to her weight since she had last waltzed with satisfaction to herself; that also was not a pleasing thought.  So when her dinner lord essayed to entice her, she shook her head.  A dozen other men, and the cream of them too—­there was comfort in that—­ followed his example, and made her charming compliments when she said laughingly that she was “too old for these frivolities”.

“Too old—­gracious heavens!” they apostrophised space.  It was heart-warming to hear them.

But they went off easily, and were soon dancing with the young girls—­ sylphs as airy and agile as she had once been.  And by degrees she drew apart from the old ladies and their talk, which she hated to seem, even to herself, to belong to, and presently found herself in the extraordinary position of sitting alone.  She leaned back in her chair, and with eyes half shut, looked at the whirling couples, and dreamed of the days—­the dances—­the youth—­that were no more.

She saw, not this splendid saloon, but a shabby small room in an old bush house—­the walls not panelled with paintings by R.A.s and starred with clusters of electric lights, but with wreaths of homely evergreens and smelly kerosene lamps.  And amid the happy throng that jostled for room to dance there, a girl and a young man, newly betrothed, anticipating an immortal paradise in each other’s arms.

And she looked up, and saw Claud Dalzell watching her.

He was horribly aged—­illness, it seemed—­and had grown quite white—­ that splendid lover with whom she had danced, as no girl here knew how to dance, in the golden prime of everything!  Their eyes met, and there must have been in both pairs something that neither of them had seen before.  He crossed to her side at once, and she did not freeze him when he got there.

“How do you do?  I have been wondering if you were going to recognise me.”

“How do you do?  I didn’t know you were here.  I never saw you until this moment.”

“I have been standing there for ten minutes.”

“I did not notice.  I was thinking—­” “You were—­deeply.  I was trying to guess what you were thinking of.”

“I wonder, did you?”

“I wonder.  Was it, by any chance”—­he dropped his voice—­“Five Creeks?”

She was quite startled and discomposed by this extraordinary divination; having no time to decide how she would take it, she filled the embarrassed moment with a laugh.

“Goodness!  I’d no idea that my face was such a tell-tale.  I believe I was.  That funny old room, with ridges in the floor, and the ceiling nearly on your head—­how did we manage to dance in it?”