Florence felt half shocked, half relieved, to hear them talking thus, as they would have talked if there had been no situation. But she left the responsibility with Longacre. She nodded casually enough to him as she went away with Thair. But, for all her lightness, she could not conceal the evidences of what had happened to her. She dared not give her eyes all the light they knew, and still Thair wondered at their brightness. She could not keep the caress out of her voice. Her laugh lay too near her lips. Her breast heaved too high. She saw that Thair noticed it, but she felt it no longer mattered. Whom she danced with, what she said, she hardly knew. “Is that yes?” she heard Longacre saying, and then her answer: “Why not?” Why not? Had she thought herself old? Her pulse was a girl’s, her color inconstant, her heart quick and irregular. She saw him across the crowd—a look. It was like a hand laid in her own. Was she beginning to live over again? Had he, for what she had given him, repaid her with youth? She was splendid in the flower of her mood. She saw Julia Budd amid the crowd, distinct from it, yet somehow less vital—a colorful, restless-eyed ghost. Among the dispersing dancers—with the carriages at the door, and the morning faint yellow through the banana leaves—Julia passed her with the others, a dimly disturbing spirit. There was something searching, seeking, baffled in the look she gave Longacre as he helped her into the carryall. He was so vital, so alive, that he seemed to have taken from Julia some of her gorgeous magnetism. But Florence knew it was from another source the vitality had sprung. She was flushed and warm and sparkling with the thought of it. It kept her brilliant through the long ride back in the cold sea wind toward the cold saffron east. She was a whirl of feeling. She rushed along with her sensations as if she dared not think. The spin of the automobile helped her. But when the rapid motion in the sharp half-light had changed for the long upward house-stair; when Longacre’s good night was but the memory of a hand-clasp around her fingers,—then she hurried to escape what was crowding on her elation. She shut the door of her room. She locked it; but the shadow that threatened had been too quick for her. The four walls closed it in. She turned up all the lights in the room. In their glare the shadow was fainter. She drew the curtains over the windows. She shut herself away from the growing light. She saw an image in her glass, a woman who loved, and was loved again, bright-eyed, hectic. The room was too small to hold her. The walls weighed down upon her. Her heart was too small to hold her happiness. Was it for that reason it ached, that it lay lead in her breast? And the fullness in her throat—tears of joy? It was very near to anguish.