The Palace of Darkened Windows Part 2

Stammering a farewell to the Evershams, he bore her off.

It would be useless to describe that waltz. It was one of the ecstatic moments which Young Joy sometimes tosses from her garlanded arms. It was one of the sudden, vivid, unforgettable delights which makes youth a fever and a desire. For Billy it was the wildest stab the s.e.x had ever dealt him. For though this was perhaps the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth girl with whom he had danced, it was as if he had discovered music and motion and girls for the first time.

The music left them by the windows.

"Thank you," said Billy under his breath.

"You didn't deserve it," said the girl, with a faint smile playing about the corners of her lips. "You know you stared--scandalously."

Grateful that she mentioned only the lesser sin, "Could I help it?"

he stammered, by way of a finished retort.

The smile deepened, "And I'm afraid you listened!"

He stared down at her anxiously. "Will you like me better if I didn't?" he inquired.

"I shan't like you at all if you did."

"Then I didn't hear a word.... Besides," he basely uttered, "you were entirely in the right!"

"I should think I was!" said Arlee Beecher very indignantly. "The very notion--! Captain Kerissen is a very nice young man. He is going to get me an invitation to the Khedive's ball."

"Is that a very crumby affair?"

"Crumby? It's simply gorgeous! Everyone is mad over it. Most tourists simply read about it, and it is too perfect luck to be invited! Only the English who have been presented at court are invited and there's a girl at the Savoy Hotel I've met--Lady Claire Montfort--who wasn't presented because she was in mourning for her grandmother last year, and she is simply furious about it. An old dowager here said that there ought to be similar distinctions among the Americans--that only those who had been presented at the White House ought to be recognized. Fancy making the White House a social distinction!" laughed the daughter of the Great Republic.

"I wonder," said Billy, "if I met a nice Turkish lady, whether she would get me an invitation? Then we could have another waltz----"

"There aren't any Turkish ladies there," uttered Miss Beecher rebukingly. "Don't you know that? When they are on the Continent--those that are ever taken there--they may go to dances and things, but here they can't, although some of them are just as modern as you or I, I've heard, and lots more educated."

"You speak," he protested, "from a superficial acquaintance with my academic accomplishments."

"Are you so very--proficient?"

"I was--I am Phi Beta Kappa," he sadly confessed.

Her laugh rippled out. "You don't look it," she cheered.

"Oh, no, I don't look it," he complacently agreed. "That's the lamp in the gloom. But I am. I couldn't help it. I was curious about things and I studied about them and faculties pressed honors upon me. I am even here upon a semi-learned errand. I wanted to have a look at the diggings a friend of mine is making at Thebes and several looks at the dam at a.s.souan, for I am by way of being an engineer myself--a beginning engineer."

"You have been up the Nile, then?"

"Yes, I'm just back. Now I'm going to see something of Cairo before I leave."

"We start up the Nile day after to-morrow," said she.

"The day after--" he stopped.

'Twas ever thus. Fate never did one good turn but she sneaked back and jabbed him unawares. She was a tricksy jade.

"That's--that's gloomy luck," said Billy, and felt outraged. "Why, how about that Khedive ball thing?"

"Oh, that's when we come back."

She was coming back, then. Hope lifted her head.

"When will that be?"

"In three weeks. It takes about three weeks to go up to the first cataract and back, doesn't it?"

"Yes, by boat," he said, adding hopefully, "but lots of people like the express trains better. They--they don't keep you so long on the way."

"Oh, I hate trains," said she cheerfully.

Three weeks ... Ruefully he surveyed the desolation. "I ought to be gone by then," he muttered.

A trifle startled, the girl looked up at him. As he was not looking at her, but staring moodily into what was then black vacancy, her look lingered and deepened. She saw a most bronzed and hardy looking young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart under straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back from a wide forehead. She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and an abrupt and aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep cleft in the blunt end of it.... She thought he was a very _stirring_ looking young man. Undoubtedly he was a very sudden young man--if he meant one bit of what he intimated.

Feminine-wise, she mocked.

"What a calamity!"

"Yes, for me," said Billy squarely. "You know it's--it's awfully jolly to meet a girl from home out here!"

"A girl from _home_----!"

"Well, all America seems home from this place. And I shouldn't be surprised if we knew a lot of the same people ... You can get a good line on me that way, you know," he laughed. "Now I went to Williams and then to Boston Tech., and there must be acquaintances----"

"Don't!" said Arlee, with a laughing gesture of prohibition. "We probably have thousands of the same acquaintances, and you would turn out to be some one I knew everything about--perhaps the first fiance of my roommate whose letters I used to help her answer."

"Where did you go to school?"

"At Elm Court School, near New York. For just a year."

He shook his head with an air of relief. "Never was engaged to anybody's roommate there.... But if you'd rather not have my background painted----"

"_Much_ rather not," said the girl gaily. "Why, half the romance, I mean the fun, of meeting people abroad is _not_ knowing anything about them beforehand."

The music was beginning again. Unwillingly the remembrance of the outer world beat back into Billy's mind. Unhappily he became aware that the room appeared blackened with young men in evening clothes, staring ominously his way.

Squarely he stood in front of the girl. "I think this is the encore to our dance," he told her with a little smile.

She shook her pretty head laughingly at him--and then yielded to his clasping hands. "But we must dance back to the Evershams," she demurred. "It is time for us to go to our concert."

But Billy had no intention of relinquis.h.i.+ng her before the music ceased. It was a one step, and it carried them with it in a gaiety of rhythm to which the girl gave herself with the light-hearted abandon of a romping child. Her light feet seemed scarcely to brush the floor; the delicate flush of her cheeks deepened with the stirring blood; her lips parted breathlessly over white little teeth, and when her eyes, intensely blue, met Billy's, the smile in them quickened in sparkling radiance. She was the very spirit of the dance; she was Youth and Joy incarnate. And the heart behind the white s.h.i.+rt bosom near which her fairy hair was floating began to pitch and toss like a laboring s.h.i.+p in the very devil of a sea.

"I think I'll go up the Nile again," said Billy irrelevantly.

She laughed elfishly at him, her head swaying faintly with the rhythm.