The exigencies of the figure gave no space for answer, and presently, after certain labyrinthine evolutions, Shirley’s eyes were gazing into his again. “How adorably you look!” he whispered, as he bowed over her hand. “How does it feel to be a queen?” “This little head was never made to wear a crown,” she laughed. “Queens should be regal. Miss Fargo would have—” The music swept the rest away, but not the look of blinding reproach he gave her that made her heart throb wildly as she glided on. The last note of the quadrille slipped into a waltz dreamily slow, and Valiant put his arm about Shirley and they floated away. Once before, in the moonlighted garden at Rosewood, she had lain in [Pg 316]his arms for one brief instant; then she had seemed like some trapped wood-thing resisting. Now, her slender body swaying to his every motion, she was another creature. Under the drooping tawny hair her face was almost as pale as the white satin of her gown; her lips were parted, and as they moved, he could feel her heart rise and fall to her languorous breath. There was no speech between them; for those few golden moments all else vanished utterly, and he guided by instinct, as oblivious to the floor-full as if he were drifting through some enchanted ether, holding to his breast the incarnation of all loveliness, a thing of as frail enchantment as the glow of stars upon snow, yet for him always the one divine vision! [Pg 317] CHAPTER XXXVI BY THE SUN-DIAL Eyes arched with fan-shielded whispers, and fair faces, fore-shortened as they turned back over powder-white shoulders, followed their swallow-like movement. From an ever-widening circle of masculine devotees Katharine Fargo watched them with a smile that cloaked an increasing and unwelcome question. Katharine had never looked more handsome; a critical survey of her mirror at Gladden Hall had assured her of that. Never had her poise been more superb, her toilet more enrapturing. She was exquisitely gowned in rose-colored mousseline-de-soie, embroidered in tiny brilliants laid on in Greek patterns. From her neck, in a single splendid loop of iridescence against the rosy mist, depended those fabulous pearls—“the kind you simply can’t believe,” as Betty Page confided to her partner—on whose newspaper reproduction (actual diameter) metropolitan shop-girls had been wont to gaze with glistening eyes; and within their milky circlet, on her rounded breast, trembled three pale gold-veined orchids. [Pg 318] Watching that quadrille through her drooping emerald-tinted eyes, she had received a sudden enlightening impression of Shirley’s flawless beauty. At the tournament her fleeting glimpse had adjudged the other merely sweetly pretty. The Chalmers’ surrey had stopped en route for Shirley, but in her wraps and veil she had then been all but invisible. This had been Katharine’s first adequate view, and the sight of her radiant charm had the effect almost of a blow.