hat man--"

She stopped.

"Promise me one thing," she said at last in a different voice. "Promise
me that you will not marry Mr. Arabian. I won't ask anything else of
you; only that."

"But I won't promise. I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because--because I don't know what I am going to do, what I might do."
She looked down, then added in a low voice; "He fascinates me."

For the first time since she had come into the room there was a helpless
sound in Miss Van Tuyn's voice, a sound that was wholly girlish,
absolutely, transparently sincere. Lady Sellingworth did not miss it.

"I haven't made up my mind," she said. "But he fascinates me."

And at that moment Lady Sellingworth knew she was speaking the truth.
She remembered her own madnesses, sunk away in the past, but still
present to her, gripped between the tentacles of memory. Beryl, too, was
then capable of the great follies which often exist side by side with
great vanity. The wild heart confronted Lady Sellingworth in another.
And she felt suddenly a deep sense of pity, a sense that seemed flooded
with tears, the pity that age sometimes feels for youth coming on into
life, on into the devious ways, with their ambushes, their traps,
their pitfalls full of darkness and fear. She was even conscious of
a tenderness of age which till now had been a rare visitor in her
difficult nature. Seymour Portman seemed near her, almost with her in
the room. She could almost hear his voice speaking of spring with all
its daffodils.

Noblesse oblige. In her torn heart could she find a nobleness sufficient
for this occasion? Seymour's eyes, the terrible eyes of affection, which
require so much and which sometimes, because of that, seem to be endowed
with creative power, forcing into life that which they long to see, were
surely upon her, watching for her nobility, asking for it, demanding it
of her.

She took Beryl Van Tuyn by the wrist and led her away from the shut door
back to the fire.

"Sit down, Beryl," she said.

The girl looked at her wondering, feeling a great change in her and not
understanding it.

"Why?" she said.

"I have something I must say to you."

Beryl dropped her muff and sat down. Lady Sellingworth stood near her.

"Beryl," she said, "you think I have been and am your enemy. I must show
you I am not. And there's only one way. You say I can't bear to see you
happy. I don't think that's true. I hope it isn't. I don't think I
wish unhappiness to other