"Drag something up here," prompted the freckled tomboy, "or I'll make you dance with me yourself." She grabbed a coat lapel, and started away with him.
I turned and laughed into the laughing face of the dark girl. I had no idea of her name, yet a haunting resemblance, a something somehow familiar came across to me which I thought for a moment was only the sweet approachableness of her young femininity.
Bowman had found and collared a partner for Ernestine Thornhill, but that was as far as it went. The little one forebore her threat of making him dance with her, came back to her chair and tucked herself in, snuggling up to the girl beside me, getting hold of a hand and looking at me across it. She rejoiced, it seems, in the nickname of Skeet, for by that the other now spoke to her whisperingly, saying it was too bad about the dance.
"That's nothing," Skeet answered promptly. "I'd a lot rather sit here and talk to you--and your gentleman friend--" with a large wink for me--"if you don't mind."
At the humorous, intimate glance which again passed between me and the dark girl, sudden remembrance came to me, and I ejaculated,
"You've changed a good deal in seven years," I defended myself.
"And you so very little," she was still smiling, "that I had almost a mind to come and shake hands with you when Ina went to speak to Worth."
I remembered then that it was Worth's recognition of her which had brought him to his feet. I told her of it, and the glowing, vivid face was suddenly all rosy. Skeet regarded the manifestation askance, asking jealously,
"When did you see Worth last, Barbie? You weren't still living in Santa Ysobel when he left, were you?"
I sat thinking while the girlish voices talked on. Barbie--the nickname for Barbara. Barbara Wallace; the name jumped at me from a poster; that's where I first saw it. It linked itself up with what Worth had said over there about the forlorn childhood of this beguiling young charmer. Why hadn't I remembered then? I, too, had my recollections of Barbara Wallace. About seven years before, I had first seen her, a slim, dark little thing of twelve or fourteen, very badly dressed in slinky, too-long skirts that whipped around preposterously thin ankles, blue-black hair dragged away from a forehead almost too fine, made into a bundle of some fashion that belonged neither to childhood nor womanhood, her little, pointed face redeemed by a pair of big black eyes with a wonderful inner light, the eyes of this girl glowing here at my left hand.