Out of her lips a little gasp of sound rang agonizingly. And in that instant, by some trick-fashion of the dance, the rollicking music stopped right off short in the middle of a note, the lights went out, the dancers fled precipitously to their seats, and out of the arbored gallery of the orchestra a single swarthy-faced male singer stepped forth into the wan wake of an artificial moon, and lifted up a marvelous tenor voice in one of those weird folk-songs of the far-away that fairly tear the listener's heart out of his body--a song as sinisterly metallic as the hum of hate along a dagger-blade; a song as rapturously surprised at its own divinity as the first trill of a nightingale; a song of purling brooks and grim, gray mountain fortresses; a song of quick, sharp lights and long, low, lazy cadences; a song of love and hate; a song of all joys and all sorrows--and then death; the song of Sex as Nature sings it--the plaintive, wheedling, passionate song of Sex as Nature sings it yet--in the far-away places of the earth. To no one else in that company probably did a single word penetrate. Merely stricken dumb by the vibrant power of the voice, vaguely uneasy, vaguely saddened, group after group of hoydenish youngsters huddled in speechless fascination around the dark edges of the hall. But to little Eve Edgarton's cosmopolitan ears each familiar gipsyish word thus strangely transplanted into that alien room was like a call to the wild--from the wild. So--as to all repressed natures the moment of full self-expression comes once, without warning, without preparation, without even conscious acquiescence sometimes--the moment came to little Eve Edgarton. Impishly first, more as a dare to herself than as anything else, she began to hum the melody and sway her body softly to and fro to the rhythm. Then suddenly her breath began to quicken, and as one half hypnotized she went clambering through the window into the ballroom, stood for an instant like a gray-white phantom in the outer shadows, then, with a laugh as foreign to her own ears as to another's, snatched up a great, square, shimmering silver scarf that gleamed across a deserted chair, stretched it taut by its corners across her hair and eyes, and with a queer little cry--half defiance, half appeal--a quick dart, a long, undulating glide--merged herself into the dagger-blade, the nightingale, the grim mountain fortress, the gay mocking brook, all the love, all the rapture, all the ghastly fatalism of that heartbreaking song. Bent as a bow her lithe figure curved now right, now left, to the lilting cadence. Supple as a silken tube her slender body seemed to drink up the fluid sound. No one could have sworn in that vague light that her feet even so much as touched the ground. She was a wraith! A phantasy! A fluctuant miracle of sound and sense!