"I've no doubt there are stories," I replied; "but I don't happen to know them. I'm as much a stranger here as you all are. So come! let us look round till it's dark enough to dance."
"Dark enough to sit out, he means," said someone to the Paris frock and hat, whereat there was a laugh, but not so general and not half so hearty as the one which greeted young Bertram's gravity as he replaced the cannon ball on the plinth with the profound remark:
"Do introduce me!" pleaded the Paris frock and hat as the lad came down, bearing the brunt of chaff gallantly; but I pretended not to hear, though I knew such diplomacy was vain with women of her type--women whose refinement makes them shameless.
Yes! she was a strange anomaly in that garden, though, Heaven knows, it appealed frankly enough to the senses. So frankly that it absorbed even such meretricious Western additions as cosy corners and iced champagne--on tables laid for two--without encroaching a hair's--breadth on the inviolable spiritual kingdom of the ivory orange blossom, the silver jasmine stars, even the red hearts of the roses.
They were lighting up the lines of the cressets about the dancing floor when we began to reassemble, and as each star of light quivered into being, the misty unreal radiance grew around the fretted marble of the summer house until arch and pilaster seemed to lose solidity, and the whole building, leaving its body behind in shining sleep, found freedom ass a palace of dreams.
And there, as a foreground to its mystical beauty, was young Bertram dangling his long legs from the pedestal and nursing the battered old bronze ball on his lap as if it had been a baby.
"I've found out all about it," he said, cheerfully. "That chap"--he pointed to a figure below him--"told me a splendid yarn, and if you lite,"--he turned to me--"as they haven't done lighting up yet, and we can't dance till they finish, he could tell it again. I could translate, you know, for those who can't understand."
The innocent pride made me smile, until the Paris frock said, "_I_ shall be so grateful if you will, Mr. Bertram," in a tone of soft friendliness which proclaimed her success and my failure. Both, however, I recognised were inevitable when I remembered that she was the wife of the lad's captain, a silent, bullet-headed Briton of whom he chose to make a hero--as boys will of older men who are not worthy to unlatch their shoes.