He watched, fascinated, the faces as they appeared and vanished; there was every imaginable expression; the serious looks of one who took dancing as a solemn task, and marked her position and considered her steps; the wild gaiety of another, all white teeth and dimples and eyes, intoxicated by movement and music and colour, as men are by wine, and guided and sustained by the furious genius of the dance, rather than by intention of any kind. There was the courtly self-restraint of one tall beauty, who danced as a pleasant duty and loved it, but never lost control of her own bending, slender grace; ah! and there was the oval face crowned with auburn hair and pearls, the lower lip drawn up under the black teeth with an effort, till it appeared to snarl, and the ropes of pearls leaping wildly on her lean purple stomacher. And over all the grave oak walls and the bright sconces and the taper flames blown about by the eddying gusts from the whirlpool beneath. As Anthony went down the square winding staircase, an hour later when the evening was over, and the keen winter air poured up to meet him, his brain was throbbing with the madness of dance and music and whirling colour. Here, it seemed to him, lay the secret of life. For a few minutes his old day-dreams came back but in more intoxicating dress. The figure of Mary Corbet in her rose-coloured silk and her clouds of black hair, and her jewels and her laughing eyes and scarlet mouth, and her violet fragrance and her fire--this dominated the boy. As he walked towards the stables across the starlit court, she seemed to move before him, to hold out her hands to him, to call him her own dear lad; to invite him out of the drab-coloured life that lay on all sides, behind and before, up into a mystic region of jewelled romance, where she and he would live and be one in the endless music of rippling strings and shrill flutes and the maddening tap of a little hidden drum. But the familiar touch of his own sober suit and the creaking saddle as he rode home to Lambeth, and the icy wind that sang in the river sedges, and the wholesome smell of the horse and the touch of the coarse hair at the shoulder, talked and breathed the old Puritan common sense back to him again. That warm-painted, melodious world he had left was gaudy nonsense; and dancing was not the same as living; and Mary Corbet was not just a rainbow on the foam that would die when the sun went in; but both she and he together were human souls, redeemed by the death of the Saviour, with His work to do and no time or energy for folly; and James Maxwell in the Tower--(thank God, however, not for long!)--James Maxwell with his wrenched joints and forehead and lips wet with agony, was in the right; and that lean bitter furious woman in the purple and pearls, who supped to the blare of trumpets, and danced to the ripple of lutes, wholly and utterly and eternally in the wrong. CHAPTER XI