"That's the first dance I had with your great-great-grandmother," he told Molly. Thereupon, he suddenly grew silent. Had he loved that dead woman, I wondered? How much did he miss her, now that he had come to his second youth again? Was this rejuvenation ever tinctured with regret? Might it not be that the backward march through life was sometimes a journey of great loneliness of soul? All the friends of his boyhood, his youth, and even of his middle-age had died long ago. In a sense, he was a solitary figure, living in a world peopled only by his memories of the dead. . . . I watched him go pensively up to his easy chair and drop into it with a deep sigh, and as he did so, some sixth sense seemed to give him an inkling of my thoughts. He looked up at me. "Memories . . ." he said. "They're strange things, George. Those little dances. . . . What visions they recall!" "May they be only the pleasant ones," I answered, inadequately. "Ah! That's the trouble! I wouldn't mind the others. One can shake them off. It's the pleasant ones which stick. . . . You feel that so many things might have been different--if only you had known. . . . The happy moment, the great joy--which lasted only an instant--and ended in nothing. . . ." He hesitated, as if he had half-turned one of the hidden pages of his past life and dreaded to read the message written by a relentless fate. "There was a minuet," he said, at last. "It went like this." He rose to his feet again and began softly humming to himself. With a courtly, old-fashioned grace, he went through the steps, his eyes half-closed and his hands extended as if towards some invisible partner. He was in another world, another time, where the mad and feverish jazzing of to-day was unknown. As he turned and pirouetted I almost heard the faint swish of the crinoline and the murmur of some hidden and distant orchestra. For nearly ten minutes he held Molly and myself silent and entranced, and then he suddenly stopped, bowed to his dream-partner,--and returned to the world of grim reality. "I'm an old fool . . ." he said. "Over fifty years ago. . . . She may be dead by now." And, as he mused, so the story of romance slowly unfolded itself. His married life had not been happy. The oldest sin on earth had been committed. He had married, not the girl he loved, but the girl whom his parents in their worldly wisdom had chosen. Money? Partly--for he was unable to support a wife without some help from his father. But, mainly, because life for the young was ordered differently in those days. One was told to do a thing and, in the end--one did it. Little boys and girls were brought up on the "to be seen and not heard" principle, until obedience to one's elders was in the blood. It was a religion, and few there were that escaped its stultifying influence. "I was only twenty," he said. "What _could_ I do?"