‘That makes it serious. And seriously, my love, you are quite right. Unless one is dead or dying, one should keep one’s dinner engagement. And, while I think of it,’ she added, addressing herself to me, ‘I must positively engage you to dine with me to-morrow. I expect the Prime Minister, and I cannot be left alone to entertain him. Eight o’clock, do you hear? He will have to leave early, so mind you are in time.’

‘To hear is to obey. Unless I am dead or dying I will keep my dinner engagement.’

‘I think I am sure of you then. You never looked better in your life.’

‘Dinner is on the table,’ said the Princess’s butler.

The ground floor of the hotel had been engaged for the dance. The fiddles were already striking up when I, in company with the other gentlemen of the party, entered the room. My promised partner was standing beside the Princess, busily inscribing the names of various aspirants on her card. I thought she might be better employed inscribing mine, and said so. She gave me the card, and I availed myself of the vacant spaces that appeared on it.

‘Quick, quick!’ she cried. ‘There is the music! Are you not longing to be off?’

Dancing varies inversely as the character of the lady who dances. With her it resembled nothing so much as flight. She scarcely seemed to touch the ground with her feet, she was as light as one of the feathers on her cloak. The music mounted to my brain as we went whirling round and round together. I felt as though I were a spirit chasing another spirit. I forgot everything else and when it stopped I could not have told whether we had been dancing hours or moments. I had begun in another state of existence.

‘Ah!’ she said, ‘your step goes well with mine.’

How I filled up the intervals when I was not dancing with her I do not know. Once, while we were standing together in the recess formed by a window, a great moth flew in and made for the lighted candelabra over our heads. There was a quick change in her.

‘O save it, save it’ she cried, clasping her little hands together in wild distress.

I caught the creature in my handkerchief and let it out again. When I returned to her she was pale and trembling.

‘He is quite safe,’ I said. ‘Do not be unhappy! After all, what would it matter if he did burn himself? In proportion, he would have lived much longer than we shall.’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘We live for ever.’

Her words sent a thrill of recollection through me.

‘Do we?’ I said in a gentler voice. ‘If you tell me so, I will believe it.’

‘Why yes, of course we do!’ she said. ‘I never heard any one say that we did not. Shall we finish this dance?’

It was the last opportunity that I had of talking to her. I think I was engaged in conversation with some one else when, later on in the evening, I heard her pleading tones close behind me.

‘Only one more! O let me stay for only one more!’

In an instant she was at my side.

‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I must have one more dance before I go. I do not know where my partner is.’