Soon the patterns of the rhythms she was attuned to took her in wider and wider circles. Then crescents. Then stars. The children backed away farther and farther from the reach of the dance, but never for an instant did their fascinated eyes leave the heart of the lovely patterns of music and stars and moons, the heart that was the dancing Ariel. They knew that she was dancing happiness, that all this glamour and beautifulness of motion and that low humming they heard sometimes through it all, were happiness. But they thought it came from their own hearts. They scarcely separated their happiness, while she danced, from the dancer’s. She was their happiness come out of their hearts into form and motion.
So, when the dance slowed, it was as though the world and even the firmament and their own hearts were all slowing down together. Then she was standing perfectly still. As before, Persis and Nicky had never taken part in beautiful motion, so now they had never taken part in such lovely stillness. This Ariel was smiling at them. A smile of poignant sympathy. It was a smile that pointed the corners of her lips brightly like little darts of silver flame. She held out her hands to them again. They came to her as they had come yesterday morning on the sun deck, with perfect assurance, but sensitive delicacy. Slowly, their hands in hers, with clumsy but happy feet, they walked a circle with her.
That night Hugh did not return to dinner, in spite of his message delivered by Ariel. Already, before she had returned to the house after her wood’s adventure with Persis and Nicky, Hugh had telephoned from his office in New York that sudden and important business was taking him to Chicago, and asked that Glenn bring him a bag to the Grand Central with enough clothes in it for a week at least.
It was Hugh Ariel’s father had sent her to, to await the exhibition, and her consent to come had been because it was her father’s plan for her, and she had taken it for granted that both he and Hugh were in agreement about its reasonableness. But now that she was here, and Hugh away off in the States somewhere, Ariel felt that her presence at Wild Acres was unexplainable, not only to others but to herself. If Hugh had only sent a message back to her by Glenn, who took him his bag, or if he should write her a letter from Chicago, it might tie her down, save her from this sense of floating in her environment without an anchor. But if Hugh had sent a good-by message by Glenn, Glenn had forgotten to mention it, and although several times Ariel started to ask him about it, she never quite brought herself to the point; for if Glenn should be certain that there was no message, then Ariel was afraid of the desolation which she would feel. And no letter came by the post.