"But I want you to," declares Bertie. "Mr. Eugene has so roused my curiosity." Floyd takes her hand with a certain sense of mastery, and she yields. It is not the glad, joyous alacrity she has heretofore evinced. Eugene's half-confession, made with a feeling of honor that rarely attacks the young man, has failed of its mission. Some sense of fine adjustment is wanting. Mrs. Dayre strikes into a florid whirl that would answer for a peasant picnic under the trees. "Not that," says Eugene. "Some of those lovely, undulating movements. Oh, there is that Beautiful Blue Danube----" "Which they waltzed when they came out of the ark," laughs Bertie, "but it is lovely." The strain touches Violet. The great animating hope for joy has dropped out of her life, but youth is left, and youth cannot help being moved. Mrs. Dayre plays with an enchanting softness, and they float up and down as in some tranced sea. "She waltzes fairly," comments Miss Dayre, "only she should be taller. I should like to waltz with him myself." "They are a sort of Darby and Joan couple," says Eugene, evasively, "and his dancing days are about over." "What a--mistake!" and Bertie laughs brightly. "Why, he is magnificent. Do you know I had a rather queer fancy about him; you expect literary men to be--well, grave and severe. The idea of his marrying a child like that! Why did he do it?" "Because he loved her," replies the young man, with unblushing mendacity. "Literary men and the clergy always do perpetrate matrimony in a curious manner. Do they go out much?" inclining her head toward the two floating at the other end of the room. "Oh, to dinners and that sort of thing!" indifferently. "She is very sweet and has lovely eyes, but she is not the kind of person that I should think would attract him." "What is it--the 'impossible that always happens'?" quotes Eugene, and as they come nearer Miss Dayre has the grace to be silent. Floyd Grandon feels that some enthusiasm is missing, the divine flavor has gone out of it. Violet is so gentle, so quiet and unstirred by what only a little while ago carried her captive into an enchanted realm. "Are you tired?" he asks, presently. "Oh, no!" She makes no motion for a release, and they go on. Indeed, it has a kind of pungent bitter-sweet elusiveness for her, almost as if she might come up with the lost happiness. "It is all there is, and she must make herself content," she is saying over and over. She has dreamed a wild, impossible dream. Bertie Dayre is fond of conquests in strange lands. Even Violet comes to be amused at the frank bids she makes for Floyd's favor, but he seems not to see, to take them with the grave courtesy that is a part of his usual demeanor. Yet the preference has this effect upon him, to make him wish that another would try some delicate allurements. He is in a mood to be won to love, and Violet is fatally blind not to see that her day has come and take advantage of it.