At dinner and later when the moon had risen and the guests danced on the smooth mosaic floor of an outdoor pavilion cunningly fashioned in the semblance of a Greek theater, her eyes were pools of laughter and her repartee was like wine sparkle--for at least she had learned to act with the empty bravery of her world. In the constant attendance of men who chattered compliments she felt a haunting sense of pursuit and a secret impulse for flight, so that at the first opportunity she slipped away for the relief of solitude. There were many vine-embowered retreats about the place where those who did not wish to dance might talk softly in the blue shadows of Grecian urns with star-shine and moon-mist for their tete-a-tetes. In such a place sat Mary Burton, alone--looking about her for a means of more secure escape. Her imagination kept disturbing her with the figure of a small girl whose home was a soon-to-be-abandoned farm. A yearning possessed her for the one thing which she could not command, the sort of romance that sweeps one away like a torrent. That little girl had yearned for the gifts of the world, for experience, wealth and adulation, because she fancied that out of these things came romance and its prize of happiness. The woman had them all--except the end of them all for which she had wanted them. They were dulled and tarnished by satiety and she still craved the coming of a lover whose forceful wooing should frighten and dominate her. Never in her life had she known any man upon whom she could not, with her trained self-reliance, set her own metes and bounds. Surely somewhere in the world there must be the sort of love-making that wrenches a woman out of her perfect self-composure and bears her away on its flood tide of power and passion. Perhaps she had been schooled and "finished" until humanity and its wonderful reality had, for her, ceased to exist. Suddenly she felt an upflaming of resentment against the generosity of her Napoleonic brother. In exchange for life's golden chance of romance she had been given a wonderful veneer of hard brilliancy--and she hated it! After a few moments of rebellious introspection she shook her head and rose from her seat, slipping behind the tall marble urn that rose from the end of the bench into the enveloping shadows. She was seeking a refuge where she might hide and hear the music softened by the distance and she kept walking, lured on by the wildness of the surrounding hills which just now better suited her mood than the clipped hedges. She found a place at last from which, as one apart, she could look up at the stars and down at the dancers.