shioned divans were drawn up, with a claw-footed table between
them. A silver salver filled with tall glasses was set carelessly on one
edge of the table; a half-open fan of sandal-wood lay beside it; a man's
glove had fallen on the hearth just within the tarnished brass fender.
Cobwebs depended from the ceiling, and hung in loose threads from the
mantel; dust was upon everything, thick and motionless; a single ghostly
ray of light that filtered in through a crevice in one of the shutters
was weighted with gray lustreless motes. The room was empty and silent.
The visitors, who had come so stealthily, had as stealthily departed,
leaving no trace behind them.

"They have played us a pretty trick," said Keith, gayly. "They must have
fled as soon as they saw us start towards the house." He went over to
the window from which the girl had looked down into the rose garden, and
gave it a shake. The dust flew up in a suffocating cloud, and the spiked
nails which secured the upper sash rattled in their places.

"That is like Suzette Beauvais," Felice replied, absently. She was not
thinking of Suzette. She had forgotten even the stranger, whose
disdainful eyes, fixed upon herself, had moved her sweet nature to
something like a rebellious anger. Her thoughts were on the beautiful
young mother of alien race, whose name, for some reason, she was
forbidden to speak. She saw her glide, gracious and smiling, along the
smooth floor; she heard her voice above the call and response of the
violins; she breathed the perfume of her laces, backward-blown by the
swift motion of the dance!

She strayed dreamily about, touching with an almost reverent finger
first one worm-eaten object and then another, as if by so doing she
could make the imagined scene more real. Her eyes were downcast; the
blood beneath her rich dark skin came and went in brilliant flushes on
her cheeks; the bronze hair, piled in heavy coils on her small,
well-poised head, fell in loose rings on her low forehead and against
her white neck; her soft gray gown, following the harmonious lines of
her slender figure, seemed to envelop her like a twilight cloud.

"She is adorable," said Richard Keith to himself.

It was the first time that he had been really alone with her, though
this was the third week of his stay in the hospitable old mansion where
his father and his grandfather before him had been welcome guests. Now
that he came to think of it, in that bundle of yellow, tim