“What would be the use?” returned the girl.
Colville rose. “After my performance in the Lancers, I can’t expect you to believe me; but I really do know how to waltz.” He had but to extend his arms, and she was hanging upon his shoulder, and they were whirling away through a long orbit of delight to the girl.
“Oh, why have you let me do you such injustice?” she murmured intensely. “I never shall forgive myself.”
“It grieved me that you shouldn’t have divined that I was really a magnificent dancer in disguise, but I bore it as best I could,” said Colville, really amused at her seriousness. “Perhaps you’ll find out after a while that I’m not an old fellow either, but only a ‘Lost Youth.’ ”
“Hush,” she said; “I don’t like to hear you talk so.”
“How?”
“About—age!” she answered. “It makes me feel—Don’t tonight!”
Colville laughed. “It isn’t a fact that my blinking is going to change materially. You had better make the most of me as a lost youth. I’m old enough to be two of them.”
She did not answer, and as they wound up and down through the other orbing couples, he remembered the veglione of seventeen years before, when he had dreamed through the waltz with the girl who jilted him; she was very docile and submissive that night; he believed afterward that if he had spoken frankly then, she would not have refused him. But he had veiled his passion in words and phrases that, taken in themselves, had no meaning—that neither committed him nor claimed her. He could not help it; he had not the courage at any moment to risk the loss of her forever, till it was too late, till he must lose her.
“Do you believe in preexistence?” he demanded of Imogene.
“Oh yes!” she flashed back. “This very instant it was just as if I had been here before, long ago.”
“Dancing with me?”
“With you? Yes—yes—I think so.”
He had lived long enough to know that she was making herself believe what she said, and that she had not lived long enough to know this.
“Then you remember what I said to you—tried to say to you—that night?” Through one of those psychological juggles which we all practise with ourselves at times, it amused him, it charmed him, to find her striving to realise this past.
“No; it was so long ago? What was it?” she whispered dreamily.
A turn of the waltz brought them near Mrs. Bowen; her mask seemed to wear a dumb reproach. He began to be weary; one of the differences between youth and later life is that the latter wearies so soon of any given emotion.
“Ah, I can’t remember, either! Aren’t you getting rather tired of the waltz and me?”
“Oh no; go on!” she deeply murmured. “Try to remember.”
The long, pulsating stream of the music broke and fell. The dancers crookedly dispersed in wandering lines. She took his arm; he felt her heart leap against it; those innocent, trustful throbs upbraided him. At the same time his own heart beat with a sort of fond, protecting tenderness; he felt the witchery of his power to make this young, radiant, and beautiful creature hang flattered and bewildered on his talk; he liked the compassionate worship with which his tacit confidence had inspired her, even while he was not without some satirical sense of the crude sort of heartbroken hero he must be in the fancy of a girl of her age.
“Let us go and walk in the corridor a moment,” he said. But they walked there till the alluring melancholy music of the waltz began again. In a mutual caprice, they rejoined the dance.
It came into his head to ask, “Who is he?” and as he had got past denying himself anything, he asked it.
“He? What he?”
“He that Mrs. Bowen thought might object to your seeing the Carnival?”
“Oh!—oh yes! That was the not impossible he.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s not even the not improbable he?”
“No, indeed.”
They waltzed in silence. Then, “Why did you ask me that?” she murmured.
“I don’t know. Was it such a strange question?”
“I don’t know. You ought to.”
“Yes, if it was wrong, I’m old enough to know better.”
“You promised not to say ‘old’ any more.”
“Then I suppose I mustn’t. But you mustn’t get me to ignore it, and then laugh at me for it.”
“Oh!” she reproached him, “you think I could do that?”
“You could if it was you who were here with me once before.”
“Then I know I wasn’t.”
Again they were silent, and it was he who spoke first. “I wish you would tell me why you object to the interdicted topic?”
“Because—because I like every time to be perfect in itself.”
“Oh! And this wouldn’t be perfect in itself if I were—not so young as some people?”
“I didn’t mean that. No; but if you didn’t mention it, no one else would think of it or care for it.”
“Did anyone ever accuse you of flattering, Miss Graham?”
“Not till now. And you are unjust.”
“Well, I withdraw the accusation.”
“And will you ever pretend such a thing again?”
“Oh, never!”
“Then I have your promise.”
The talk was light wordplay, such as depends upon the talker’s own mood for its point or its pointlessness. Between two young people of equal years it might have had meanings to penetrate, to sigh over, to question. Colville found it delicious to be pursued by the ingenuous fervour of this young girl, eager to vindicate her sincerity in prohibiting him from his own ironical depreciation. Apparently, she had a sentimental mission of which he was the object; he was to be convinced that he was unnecessarily morbid; he was to be cheered up, to be kept in heart.
“I must believe in you after this,” he said, with a smile which his mask hid.
“Thanks,” she breathed. It seemed to him that her hand closed convulsively upon his in their light clasp.
The pressure sent a real pang to his heart. It forced her name from his lips. “Imogene! Ah,
