I was standing near the receiving line of ladies when Chalmers Warriner came up; and, in spite of my secret dislike and suspicion, I could not help thinking how distinguished looking he was--just the sort of man that a woman invariably favors with a second glance. And now he was lingering for that maddening hundredth part of a second over Betty's hand; I heard him whisper: "The supper waltz then?" and I saw Betty start and flush and finally nod a smiling assent. Ignoble of me to be standing there, actually spying on my own wife! I admit the justice of your censure, dear reader, but have you ever endured even the smallest pang of the jealous man's agony? One ought to be competent to testify in this particular court. I suppose I went through the ordinary motions of a man attending a ball; I have a vague recollection of dancing at least half a dozen times; I comforted innumerable elderly dowagers and flagons of near-claret cup, and encouraged several flappers to venture on their first cigarette in the friendly dusk of the pleached lime alley; I even played one rubber of auction with the colonel, the commodore, and the judge, while they were awaiting the arrival of the rector to make up their accustomed coterie. But my eyes were always fixed on the big clock at the end of the hall; according to our simple country fashion supper was invariably scheduled for midnight, and was preceded by the principal waltz number of the dance program. There it came at last! the opening bars of Strauss's "On the Beautiful Blue Danube." Why is it that smiles and tears lie so close together in the lilt and swing of a fine waltz tune? And, by that same token, the saddest music in all the world to-day is that same "Blue Danube," the last, faint exhalation of an old regime that, however rotten at its core, continued to present a lovely and gracious exterior. At least there were no war-brides and greasy Israelitish profiteers on the polished boards of the ancient Hofberg when Maestro Johann raised his baton, and his incomparable band, in their gay Hussar uniforms, breathed out the intoxicating melody which the great Brahms himself would not have been ashamed to have composed, the veritable apotheosis of the dance. Gone, all gone! and this old, gray world, albeit made safe for democracy, has yet lost something of perennial beauty and enchantment that can never be renewed--a broken spell, a vanished vision. The wax candles have guttered to their sockets, the shimmering waves of color are graying under the merciless white light of a proletarian dawn, the haunting violins have sobbed themselves to sleep; and of all that brilliant, bewildering, phantasmagoric past there remains but one poignant and exquisite echo--the "Blue Danube."