“Remember, we can only have this one day together.” The quiet utterance of the words stung Jean into a realisation of their significance, and suddenly she was conscious that the knowledge that this unknown Englishman was going away--going out of her life as abruptly as he had come into it--filled her with a quite disproportionate sense of regret. She found herself unexpectedly up against the recognition of the fact that she would miss him--that she would like to see him again. “Then--you want me to forget?” she asked rather wistfully. Her eyes fell away from him as she spoke. “Yes,” he returned gravely. “Just that. I want you to forget.” “And--and you?” The words seemed dragged from her without her own volition. “I? Oh”--he laughed a little--“I’m afraid I’m inconsistent. I’m going to ask you to give me something I can remember. That’ll even matters up, if you forget and I--remember.” “What do you want me to give you?” He made a sudden step towards her. “I want you to dance with me--just once. Will you?”--intently. He waited for her reply, his keen, compelling glance fixed on her face. Then, as though he read his answer there, he stepped to her side and held out his arm. “Come,” he said. Almost as if she were in a dream, Jean laid her hand lightly on his sleeve and he pulled aside the portière for her to pass through. Then, putting his arm about her, he swung her out on to the smooth floor of the _salle_. They danced almost in silence. Somehow the customary small-change of ballroom conversation would have seemed irrelevant and apart. This dance--the Englishman had implied as much--was in the nature of a farewell. It was the end of their stolen day. The band was playing _Valse Triste_, that unearthly, infinitely sad vision of Sibelius’, and the music seemed to hold all the strange, breathless ecstacy, the regret and foreboding of approaching end of which this first, and last, dance was compact. It was over at last. The three final chords of the _Valse_--inexorable Death knocking at the door--dropped into silence, and with the end of the dance uprose the eager hum of gay young voices, as the couples drifted out from the _salle_ in search of the buffet or of secluded corners in which to “sit out” the interval, according as the spirit moved them. Jean and her partner, making their way through the throng, encountered Madame de Varigny on the arm of a handsome Bedouin Arab. For the fraction of a second her eyes rested curiously on Jean’s partner, and a gleam of something that seemed like triumph flickered across her face. But it was gone in an instant, and, murmuring some commonplace to Jean, she passed on. “Who was that?” The Englishman rapped out the question harshly, and Jean was struck by an unaccustomed note in his voice. It held apprehension, distaste; she could not quite analyse the quality.