The warmth about her heart made it beat a little faster. She opened the door of her wardrobe when she found herself in her bedroom. The dress hung modestly in its corner shrouded from the penetration of London fogs by clean sheeting. It was only white and as simple as she knew how to order it, but Mademoiselle had taken her to a young French person who knew exactly what she was doing in all cases, and because the girl had the supple lines of a wood nymph and the eyes of young antelope she had evolved that which expressed her as a petal expresses its rose. Robin locked her door and took the dress down and found the silk stockings and slippers which belonged to it. She put them all on standing before her long mirror and having left no ungiven last touch she fell a few steps backward and looked at herself, turning and balancing herself as a bird might have done. She turned lightly round and round. “Yes. I _am_—” she said. “I am—very!” The next instant she laughed at herself outright. “How silly! How silly!” she said. “Almost _everybody_ is—more or less! I wonder if I remember the new steps.” For she had been taught the new steps—the new walking and swayings and pauses and sudden swirls and swoops. And her new dress was as short as other fashionable girls’ dresses were, but in her case revealed a haunting delicacy of contour and line. So before her mirror she danced alone and as she danced her lips parted and her breast rose and fell charmingly, and her eyes lighted and glowed as any girl’s might have done or as a joyous girl nymph’s might have lighted as she danced by a pool in her forest seeing her loveliness mirrored there. Something was awakening as something had awakened when Donal had kissed a child under the soot sprinkled London trees. CHAPTER XXXI