"It grieved me that you shouldn't have divined that I was really a magnificent dancer in disguise, but I bore it as best I could," said Colville, really amused at her seriousness. "Perhaps you'll find out after a while that I'm not an old fellow either, but only a 'Lost Youth.'" "Hush," she said; "I don't like to hear you talk so." "How?" "About--age!" she answered. "It makes me feel----- Don't to-night!" Colville laughed. "It isn't a fact that my blinking is going to change materially. You had better make the most of me as a lost youth. I'm old enough to be two of them." She did not answer, and as they wound up and down through the other orbing couples, he remembered the veglione of seventeen years before, when he had dreamed through the waltz with the girl who jilted him; she was very docile and submissive that night; he believed afterward that if he had spoken frankly then, she would not have refused him. But he had veiled his passion in words and phrases that, taken in themselves, had no meaning--that neither committed him nor claimed her. He could not help it; he had not the courage at any moment to risk the loss of her for ever, till it was too late, till he must lose her. "Do you believe in pre-existence?" he demanded of Imogene. "Oh yes!" she flashed back. "This very instant it was just as if I had been here before, long ago." "Dancing with me?" "With you? Yes--yes--I think so." He had lived long enough to know that she was making herself believe what she said, and that she had not lived long enough to know this. "Then you remember what I said to you--tried to say to you--that night?" Through one of those psychological juggles which we all practise with ourselves at times, it amused him, it charmed him, to find her striving to realise this past. "No; it was so long ago? What was it?" she whispered dreamily. A turn of the waltz brought them near Mrs. Bowen; her mask seemed to wear a dumb reproach. He began to be weary; one of the differences between youth and later life is that the latter wearies so soon of any given emotion. "Ah, I can't remember, either! Aren't you getting rather tired of the waltz and me?" "Oh no; go on!" she deeply murmured. "Try to remember." The long, pulsating stream of the music broke and fell. The dancers crookedly dispersed in wandering lines. She took his arm; he felt her heart leap against it; those innocent, trustful throbs upbraided him. At the same time his own heart beat with a sort of fond, protecting tenderness; he felt the witchery of his power to make this young, radiant, and beautiful creature hang flattered and bewildered on his talk; he liked the compassionate worship with which his tacit confidence had inspired her, even while he was not without some satirical sense of the crude sort of heart-broken hero he must be in the fancy of a girl of her age.