It spared no one. They
were like dead leaves dancing helplessly in its midst. Even Stonehouse
felt it at his throat, a choking, senseless laughter.
He saw Cosgrave lean forward, and in the half light he had a queer,
startled look. With his thick red hair and small white face he might
have been some sick thing of the woods scenting the air in answer to
far-off familiar piping's. He made Robert Stonehouse see the faun in
Frances Wilmot's room, the room itself and Frances Wilmot, with her chin
resting in her hands, gazing into the fire. The picture was gone almost
before he knew what he had seen. But it was knife-sharp. It was as
though a hand fumbling over a blank wall had touched by accident a secret
spring and a door had flown wide open, closing instantly.
"I'm Gyp Labelle;
If you dance with me
You must dance to my tune
Whatever it be."
She jumped into the incessant music as a child jumps into a whirling
skipping-rope. She had a quaint French accent, but she couldn't sing.
She had no voice. And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture
of good-humoured contempt and danced. But she couldn't dance either. It
was a wild gymnastic--a display of incredible, riotous energy, the
delirious caperings of a gutter-urchin caught in the midst of some
gutter-urchin's windfall by a jolly tune. A long-haired youth leapt on
to the stage from the stage-box, and caught her by the waist and swung
her about him and over his shoulder so that her plumes swept the ground
and the great chain of pearls made a circle of white light about them
both.
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