"Hold your tongue--for Heaven's sake, my dear fellow," I exclaimed in a rapid aside--"don't breathe my name: at this moment I have not the most remote idea who I am, and am constantly on the verge of an unpardonable scrape; be silent and begone, I will tell you all afterwards." Silenced and amazed, poor Burton retired, and my unknown friend, turning to me as I stood elate at having conquered difficulties, again showed me my uncertain footing by observing--"But you used to cherish the most heretical opinions on these points, and offend me not a little by their open avowal." What an ill-bred savage she must identify me with! "Raw boys are always odious and irrational; you should not have deigned to listen to me," said I in despair. "Oh! you were by no means a raw boy, you looked quite as old as you do now; besides, it is not half a century since we met," she replied, with another distracting look; and then--with a merry burst of apparently irrepressible laughter, in which, though I could not account for it, her friends and myself joined--it was so infectious, added--"You must forgive me, but really your reminiscences seem to be in such inextricable confusion, I cannot help laughing." In an agony lest all should be discovered--with the respectable couple before-mentioned for umpires, I urged in defence "that my memory was like the background of a picture from which one figure alone stood out clear and well defined." Then, observing that she was beating time to the sound of a most delicious waltz just begun, "Am I too unreasonable to ask for a waltz as well as a quadrille," I said. She half shook her head, then, smiling to her companions, observed--"It is so long since I had a waltz I cannot resist it; shall I keep you too late, _Caro Maestro_?" "No, no," said the lady with the cap, "we will go and watch you." In a few moments I was whirling my fair incognita round to the inspiring strains of the Elfin Waltz, then new and unhacknied. What a delicious waltz that was! My partner seemed endowed with the very spirit of the dance: her light pliant form seemed to respond to every tone of the music, and not an unpractised _valseur_ myself, I felt that I was, at all events, no encumbrance to her movements. I have never heard that waltz since--whether ground on the most deplorable of barrel organs, or blown in uncertain blasts from the watery instruments of a temperance band--without seeing, as in a magic mirror, the whole scene conjured up before my eyes: the intense enjoyment of my partner, which beamed so eloquently from her soft grey eyes, and spoke volumes of the nature it expressed: the childlike simplicity with which, when at length wearied, she stopped and said, turning to me--"You dance very well! How I have enjoyed that waltz!"