Miss Dounay’s arm was on John’s shoulder, and she was preparing to suit the rest; of her action to her words. "Without any effort to lift me," she continued, talking now into his ear, "I will be extended in your arms. All you have to do is to be taking your running stride as I come to you, and after that to hold me poised while you bound off the stage. Can you do it?" With this crisp, challenging question on her lips, Miss Dounay completed the proposed manoeuvre of her lower limbs, and John found himself with the long, exquisitely moulded body of a beautiful woman balancing in his arms, while a foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled. [Illustration: A foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.] "Am I so heavy?" asked a matter-of-fact voice from his shoulder. "You are not heavy at all," replied Hampstead, hotly provoked at himself. "Run, then," she commanded. The resultant effort was a few staggering, ungraceful steps. "Dounay weighs a hundred and fifty if she weighs an ounce," said a passing voice. John, all chagrin as he deposited the lady upon her feet, saw her lip curl, and her dark eyes flash scornfully at the leading juvenile man who, with grimacing intent to tease, had made the remark to the ingenue as both passed near. "Insolence!" hissed Miss Dounay after the scoffer, and turned again to Hampstead, speaking sharply. "Very bad! You must be in your running stride when my weight falls on you. We must practice." And practice they did, at every spare moment of the rehearsal during the entire week. From these "practices", Hampstead learned an unusual number of things about women which, in his limited experience, he had either not known or which had not been brought home to him before. Some of these he presumed applied generally to all women; others, he had no doubt, were particular to Miss Dounay. As, for instance, when he looked down at her face where it lay in the curve of his arm, he saw that the oval outline of her cheeks was startlingly perfect; that there were pools of liquid fire in her eyes; that her lips were beautifully and naturally red; that they were long, pliable, sensitive, with fleeting curves that raced like ripples upon these shores of velvet and ruby, expressing as they ran an infinite variety of passing moods. The chin, too, came in for a great deal of this attention. It was round and smooth at the corners, with a delicately chiseled vertical cleft in it, which at times ran up and met a horizontal cleft that appeared beneath the lower lip, when any slight breath of displeasure brought a pout to that ruby, pendant lobe. This meeting-place of the two clefts formed a kind of transitory dimple, a trysting-place of all sorts of fugitive attractions which exercised a singular fascination for the big man.