Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/112



LITTLE while before midnight Irene, accompanied by Krylenko, returned from the Flats and hurried quietly as a moth through the gallery past the brightly lighted windows and up the stairway to her room. The mill worker left her at the turn of the drive where he stood for a time in the melting snow fascinated by the sound of music and the sight of the dancers through the tall windows. Among them he caught a sudden glimpse of Irene's sister, the woman who had watched him at work in the mill shed. She danced a waltz with the master of the Mills, laughing as she whirled round and round with a wild exuberance. Amid the others who took their pleasures so seriously, she was a bacchante, pagan, utterly abandoned. The black fan hung from her wrist and the pale yellow-green ball gown left all her breast and throat exposed in a voluptuous glow of beauty. Long after the music stopped and she had disappeared, Krylenko stood in the wet snowbank staring blindly at the window which she had passed again and again. He stood as if hypnotized, as if incapable of action. At length a coachman, passing by, halted for a moment to regard him in astonishment, and so roused him into action. Murmuring something in Russian, he set off down the long drive walking well to one side to keep from under the wheels of the fine carriages which had begun to leave.

The last carriage, containing Willie Harrison and two female cousins, passed through the wrought iron gates a little after one o'clock, leaving Lily, her mother and Ellen Tolliver who, having no carriage of her own, had chosen this night to spend at Cypress Hill, alone amid the wreckage of crumpled flowers and forgotten cotillion favors. With the departure of the last carriage and the finish of the music, the gleam died out of Julia Shane's eyes. She became again an old