Ah, Lady Mary, you are a good twelve stone nowadays, but when that poor younger cousin gave you that look in the garden and the roses crawled over the old dial in the moonlight, you were slighter, and crueler! "_Bid_ me good-_bye_ and _go_!" It was a waltz, oh, yes, but it was a very Dance of Death to those of us who had any parting to look back to, that changed our life--and we could never go back again and make it better; never any more. That was what cut so, and Margarita, dark and slim like a plain brown nightingale, who leaves plumage to the raucous peacock because it matters so little what she, the real queen of us all, wears--Margarita spelled it out remorselessly, to the tune of a mess-room waltz, and told us that youth is only once and so sweet and for so little time! And the boy beside her smiled with pleasure and embroidered her rich, clear-cut phrasing and annotated it and threw jewels and flowers of unexpected chords through it and mocked the sad, charming fatalism of it as only spendthrift youth can. "_You_ do not _love_ me, no! _Bid_ me good-_bye_ and go ..." Cruel Margarita, how could you make the tears splash down the cheeks of the poor little princess, who knew what was expected of her and had no greater sin on her conscience than a tiny lock of her yellow hair always warm, now, in the breast of a ridiculous second cousin on a sheep-ranch in far Dakota, U. S. A.? "Good-_bye_, good-_bye_, 'tis better so ..." They stand so still in this picture, those big, non-committal British, each gnawing his lip a little under the drooping mustache; the women's shoulders are ivory against the panelled oak and bowls of Guelder roses in Chinese bowls; that beautiful line from the base of the throat to the top of the _corsage_ which America has not to give her daughters, as yet, heaves and droops; the Romneys smile behind their wax candles in sconces. It is only a waltz of the street, but she has bewitched us with it, has our Margarita. But strongest and clearest of all, keen in light and dense in shadow like a Rembrandt, I see that extraordinary night in Trafalgar Square, that night that surely lives unique in the memory of Nelson and the Lions, though most that shared it may be, and doubtless are--for they were not for various reasons long-lived classes of people--dead and dust by now. How and why we found ourselves at Trafalgar Square I could not tell, though I went to the stake for it this minute. But I think it must have been that Margarita wanted to walk through the streets, a form of exercise for which she took fitful fancies at odd times, and that I, as was mostly the case, went with her. We were all alone, for Roger, who shared our walks usually, when he was not too busy, had just left for Berlin an hour earlier, on one of his patient unravellings of Carter's diplomatic tangles.