Florence had never felt more alone in her life than on that swarming hotel veranda. She saw Cissy Fitz Hugh with a hand out to a dozen the minute she was out of the automobile—full-necked, close-cropped men; liquid-eyed women with cheeks like peaches and voices like ringing glass; how Cissy seemed to belong among them, to be one of them with an identity eloquent of a dozen summers of common pursuits, gossips, and scandals. Florence’s steel and lace sheared through their softer fabrics like a blade through flowers. The great rooms were filled, jammed. To the hotel inmates had been added by degrees the parties from the cottages along the shore. The assemblage showed its “mixedness” by the sharp lines of its cliques, made up like a Chinese toy—ring within ring; the outer, whoever could manage a night at the hotel for the sake of a show; the inner, by their sharper individuality of manner and gown and their air of belonging exactly where they happened to be, undoubtedly the show, and supremely regardless of it. Of them, a woman in heliotrope, with passementerie dragons running up her arms, waved to Florence, and drew her into her shouting group, crying, “You here!” and “Who next where!” “And where,” she wanted to know at the top of her voice, “is the sweet musician—the American with the short hair, who was at your elbow in London?” “In much the same position,” came Longacre’s soft drawl over Florence’s shoulder. “The dear impertinence,” the lady-dragoness appealed, “of taking that description to yourself!” “Oh, it was too perfect,” he insisted. “The American with the short hair!” “_And_ the sweet musician!” Florence teased. A note in her voice took him back to Vienna and their fresher days. He looked at her. She seemed a reawakened memory—flushed cheeks, and a stinging light in her eyes. “Oh, the sweet musician”—Longacre was very easy about him—“is pigeonholed in New York.” “What, that dear thing you were playing us catches of last spring?” The dragoness was all vociferous sympathy, but through it he remained aware of Florence Essington’s pure profile averted from him, looking across the room toward a gorgeous, rose-like Julia, blooming, the center of a circle of black coats. But for Longacre, at that moment, the other side of the room might well have been the other side of the world. As the orchestra slid into a waltz of Strauss, and the lady of dragons was drawn away into the measure, he laid an eager hand on Florence’s arm, with an “Oh, I say, dance this with _me_!” hard to be denied. But she nodded across the room toward Thair approaching with long stride and confident smile. “It is promised, but—” “Well,” he frowned, “the next, then.” “Well—” she acceded. “And the next.” As she hesitated he muttered, “Do you know what I want?” He leaned nearer. “I want the whole evening, as we used—all of ’em!” “Oh, only that!” she fairly laughed at him.