uttrell's face coloured. "Why, that's true enough," he said. He was
remembering the afternoon a week ago, when the yacht steamed between the
green islands with their bathing stations and chalets, over a tranquil,
sunlit sea of the deepest blue. Rounding a wooded corner towards sunset
she came suddenly upon the bridges and the palace and the gardens of
Stockholm. The women of the party were in the saloon. A rush was made
towards it. They were summoned to this first wonderful view of the city
of beauty. Would they come? No! Stella Croyle was in the middle of a
game of Russian patience. She could play that game any day, every day,
all day. This exquisite vision was vouchsafed to her but the once, and
she had neglected it with the others. She had not troubled, even to move
so far as the saloon door. For she had not finished her game.

Luttrell recalled his feeling of scorn; the scorn had grown into
indignation; in the end he had made a grievance of her indifference to
this first view of the city of Stockholm; a foolish, exasperating
grievance, which would rankle, which would not be buried, which sprang
to fresh life at each fresh sight of her. Yes, of a certainty, sooner or
later Stella Croyle and he would quarrel, so bitterly that all the
king's horses and all the king's men could never bring them again
together; and over some utterly unimportant matter like the first view
of Stockholm.

"Youth has many privileges over age," continued Hardiman, "but none
greater than the vision, the half-interpreted recurring vision of wider
spaces and greater things, towards which you sail on the wind of a great
emotion. Sooner or later, a man loses that vision and then only knows
his loss. Stay here, and you'll lose it before your time."

Luttrell looked curiously at his companion, wondering what manner of man
he had been in his twenties. Hardiman answered the look with a laugh.
"Oh, I, too, had my ambitions once."

Luttrell folded the cablegram which Hardiman had written out and placed
it in the breast pocket of his dinner-jacket.

"I will talk to Stella to-night at dinner. Then, if I decide to send it,
I can send it from the hotel over there at the landing-steps before we
return to the yacht."

Sir Charles Hardiman rose cumbrously with a shrug of his shoulders. He
had done his best, but since Luttrell would talk the question over with
Stella Croyle, shoulder to shoulder with her amongst the lights and
music, the perfume of her ha