The dancers passed and repassed them as they sat in artificial dusk. Phyllida began to hate them when they fluttered their fans and handkerchiefs. They were sickly things these dancers--crotchets and quavers and semiquavers who had captured the semblance of humanity, who breathed and bowed and capered, merely because musick had conjured them into existence. Suddenly an amazing clangour of gongs and cymbals waked her completely from the fever into which she had been flung, and, waking, she found herself encircled by her lover's arms, his eyes burning into hers and his lips, all that was left alive by the stolid vizard, eager to meet her own. "Don't," she gasped. "Don't. I hate you, I hate you when you do that." "Nay, my angel must not be so prudish. Come, kiss me of your own will and we'll gallop to Gretna Green next week." Phyllida still repulsed him. "To Gretna Green," he went on. "Drawn by a pair of cream-coloured horses, in a chaise all citron silk and rosy sattin with my Phyllida plunged into the softest cushions and her Amor to love her so fondly while trees and milestones fly past." Vernon inherited much talent from his mother, and as he breathed his persuasions in the most refined modulations of intensity, half looked over his shoulder, for an audience. "My Phyllida, your lips are soft as moths." "Don't, Amor, don't." "Soft as little moths that in wet garden paths brush the cheeks with feathery wings." "Release my hand, detestable Amor. I will sit here no longer to be tortured by your boorishness." "But why will you repulse me? you love me? We are to be wed almost at once. Why were you willing to sit in this dark corner, unless for the charms of love?" The Minuet was drawing to a close. Long since the musick had departed into wilder channels. This was now no courtly measure, but a barbarick medley of noise, fit for trumpets of India, cymbals of Ethiopia, and the hollow booming of drums that affright wrecked pirates in the green swamps of Madagascar. Vernon stood up and drew Phyllida closer. "By G----, child, you madden me with your prettiness. Come, I swear you shall kiss me before the end of the dance. You shall, by G---- you shall!" Miss Phyllida Courteen, all swansdown and blushes in our first chapter, is scarcely recognizable now. She is growing old fast. She is kindling the faggots that will warm her chill old age. But still, though passion tugged at her heart strings, the school-miss, the older Eve before the Fall, made her struggle against knowledge. "I hate you, I hate you like this. Let me go, sir, let me go!"