'
'There are no nightingales after June. There is the Manola,' as the band
struck up, 'my very favourite waltz.'
Don Gomez was at her elbow at this moment
'May I have the honour of this waltz with you, Lady Lesbia?' he asked;
and then with a serio-comic glance at his stoutish friend, 'I don't
think Smithson waltzes?'
'I have been told that nobody can waltz who has been born on this side
of the Pyrenees,' answered Lesbia, withdrawing her arm from her lover's,
and slipping, it through the Spaniard's, with the air of a slave who
obeys a master.
Smithson looked daggers, and retired to a corner of the room glowering.
Were a man twenty-two times millionaire, like the Parisian Rothschild,
he could not find armour against the poisoned arrows of jealousy. Don
Gomez possessed many of those accomplishments which make men dangerous,
but as a dancer he was _hors ligne_; and Horace Smithson knew that there
is no surer road to a girl's fancy than the magic circle of a waltz.
Those two were floating round the room in the old slow legato step,
which recalled to Smithson the picture of a still more spacious room in
an island under the Southern Cross--the blue water of the bay shining
yonder under the starlight of the tropics, fire-flies gleaming and
flashing in the foliage beyond the open windows, fire-flies flashing
amidst the gauzy draperies of the dancers, and this same Gomez revolving
with the same slow languid grace, his arm encircling the _svelte_ figure
of a woman whose southern beauty outshone Lesbia's blonde English
loveliness as the tropical stars outshine the lamps that light our
colder skies.
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