He gave her back her programme, with all the blanks filled in, and at the bottom a word written, and triply underscored, ἉΝΑΓΚΗ. They had talked of Victor Hugo’s romantic story--that romance which the great man so despised in after years that he was almost offended if any one presumed to praise it in his hearing, although in the half-century that has gone since Victor Hugo was a young man this story of Notre Dame has been unsurpassed as an example of the romantic novel. Lostwithiel had praised the book, and had talked of the monk Frollo, and his fatal love--and that word Fatality, graven upon the wall of his cell, and burnt into his soul. Isola knew what those Greek letters meant. She dropped the little white and gold programme as if it had been an adder. He went away to a duty dance with a great lady of the district--a lady whose diamonds made a light about her wherever she moved; and then he waltzed with Belinda Crowther, to the admiration of the young lady’s mother, and of two or three other matrons on the divan by the door. Were they not a splendid couple, she so brilliantly fair, he dark and pale, bronzed slightly with exposure to the sun in warmer climates than this--not positively handsome, but with such an interesting countenance. So, and so, and so prosed the matrons, until various middle-aged cavaliers came to invite them to the tea-room, where there was the usual drawback in the shape of a frightful draught from open windows, which the dancers, coming in flushed and heated, voted delicious. “This will be a good night’s work for me,” said Dr. Baynham, cheerfully, although he considered it his duty to warn his patients of their danger. Conscience thus satisfied, he could look on complacently as they eat ices, and selected cool corners of the refreshment-room to flirt in. “Next to a juvenile party, I don’t know anything better--from a professional point of view--than a public ball,” he said. “Your canvas corridors, decorated with flowers and bunting, are a fortune to a family practitioner.” Isola danced every dance. She hardly knew who her partners were. She had only a sense of floating in a vortex of light and colour, to some swinging melody. Everything was dream-like--but not horrible, as in her dream by the fireside at home. This was a happy dream, as of a creature with wings, who knew not of care in the present or a soul to be saved in the future. And then came her waltz with Lostwithiel, and that strong arm was round her, bearing her up as a flower is borne upon a rushing tide, so that she had no consciousness of movement on her own part, only of floating, floating, floating, to that languid three-time melody. It was the last popular waltz they were playing--a waltz that had been last summer’s delight in the arid gardens of South Kensington--“Il n’y a que toi;” a waltz with a chorus which the band trolled out merrily, at intervals, in the French of Stratford atte Bow.