He could not believe it. Everything that he had noticed and adored in her, her grey eyes, the delicious quality of her speech, her fragrance, the indescribable fineness—there was no other word for it—of her, denied the possibility. He found it difficult to realise that she had gone in the moment of such an astounding revelation. Such was the way of a Naiad, melting away out of her sweet mortality in the moment of possession. Standing alone at the foot of the gloomy staircase, listening in a dream to the luscious music of the Choristers’ waltz, he tried to recreate his dream out of memory. Nothing of her was left but her delicate perfume. On the stairs he saw a small crumpled muslin handkerchief from which the perfume came. He picked it up with the reverence of a pilgrim touching a relic, eagerly triumphant that he had managed to rescue a fragment of his dream. It did not strike him that this tiny square of scented muslin was presumably the instrument with which divinity blew its nose: and indeed its dimensions scarcely fitted it for this material function. He placed it in the satin-lined pocket of Mr. Jones’s creation. It pleased him to think that it lay near his heart. This, of course, was only the beginning of a romance. No doubt, in the course of the evening, he would see her again. Somehow he must persuade her to see him alone, and then he would be able to do all the magnificently passionate things of which her flight had cheated him. He would kiss her; he would hold her exquisiteness in his arms; he would tell her all the glorious things that he had been fool enough to withhold. He went back into the ballroom. Nobody seemed to notice him there. It pleased him to think that these ordinary people were too dull in their perceptions to guess at the wonder in his heart. It was a secret that he shared with only one other person in the world, and that secret had altered his whole outlook on life. He was no longer the timid boy, conscious of his social disadvantages and of his new dress clothes, who had entered the Willises’ house a couple of hours before, but a man, a lover, to whose passion the whole beauty of the world ministered, a creature miraculously placed beyond the reach of envy or of scorn. He was happy to wait patiently for the supreme moment when he should see her again. And so he waited, mildly tolerant of Griffin, over whom he had scored so easily, of Edward Willis, who performed with a set face his penitentiary programme of duty-dances, of Mrs. Willis, who watched the joy of her small daughter Lilian with the proud but anxious eyes of a mother hen, of Mr. Willis circulating among his guests with an expansive smile, of poor Lady Hingston, still revoking automatically in the card-room.