me. It is all vermilion and
orange colour, while this . . ."

"Is drab!"

"No, indeed! Dim purple, perhaps, or deepest green."

"You couldn't bear it for long. You would soon begin longing for
vermilion again."

"You seem to think me very young. I am twenty-nine."

"Have you ceased to love wildness already?"

"No," he answered truthfully. "But there is something there which makes
me feel as if it were almost vulgar."

"No, no. It need not be vulgar. It can be wonderful--beautiful, even.
It can be like the wild light which sometimes breaks out in the midst
of the blackness of a storm and which is wilder far than the darkest
clouds. Do you ever read William Watson?"

"I have read some of his poems."

"There is one I think very beautiful. I wonder if you know it. 'Pass,
thou wild heart, wild heart of youth that still hast half a will to
stay--'"

She stopped and held her fan a little higher.

"I don't know it," he said.

"It always makes me feel that the man or woman who has never had the
wild heart has never been truly and intensely human. But one must know
when to stop, when to let the wild heart pass away."

"But if the heart wants to remain?"

"Then you must dominate it. Nothing is more pitiable, nothing is more
disgusting, even, than wildness in old age. I have a horror of that.
And I am certain that nothing else can affect youth so painfully. Old
wildness--that must give youth nausea of the soul."

She spoke with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiar
and fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid through
his veins.

Suddenly he thought of the "old guard," and he knew that not one of the
truly marvellous women who belonged to it could hold him or charm him as
this white-haired woman, with the frankly old face, could and did.

"After all," he thought, "it isn't the envelope that matters; it is the
letter inside."

Deeply he believed that just then. He was, indeed, under a sort of
spell for the moment. Could the spell be lasting? He looked at Lady
Sellingworth's eyes in the lamplight and firelight, and, despite a
certain not forgotten moment connected with the Hyde Park Hotel, he
believed that it could. And Lady Sellingworth looked at him and knew
that it could not. About such a matter she had no illusions.

And yet for years she had lived a life cloudy with illusions. What had
led her out from those clouds? Braybrooke had hinted to Craven that
possibly Sey