he
Slavonian Ambassador--him, and the French Foreign Minister! That looks
like a useful combination at this moment--at this moment. She has a
gift for combinations, a wonderful skill, a still more wonderful
perception--and a remarkable unscrupulousness. She's the naturally
ablest woman I have ever known; but she wants to take short-cuts to a
worldly Elysium, and it can't be done, not even with three times three
millions--and three millions was her price."

Suddenly he got up and went over to a table where were several
dispatch-boxes. Opening one, he drew forth from the bottom, where he
had placed it nearly three years ago, a letter. He looked at the long,
sliding handwriting, so graceful and fine, he caught the perfume which
had intoxicated Rudyard Byng, and, stooping down, he sniffed the
dispatch-box. He nodded.

"She's pervasive in everything," he murmured. He turned over several
other packets of letters in the box. "I apologize," he said,
ironically, to these letters. "I ought to have banished her long ago,
but, to tell you the truth, I didn't realize how much she'd influence
everything--even in a box." He laughed cynically, and slowly opened the
one letter which had meant so much to him.

There was no show of agitation. His eye was calm; only his mouth showed
any feeling or made any comment. It was a little supercilious and
scornful. Sitting down by the table, he spread the letter out, and read
it with great deliberation. It was the first time he had looked at it
since he received it in Vienna and had placed it in the dispatch-box.

"Dear Ian," it ran, "our year of probation--that is the word isn't
it?--is up; and I have decided that our ways must lie apart. I am going
to marry Rudyard Byng next month. He is very kind and very strong, and
not too ragingly clever. You know I should chafe at being reminded
daily of my own stupidity by a very clever man. You and I have had so
many good hours together, there has been such confidence between us,
that no other friendship can ever be the same; and I shall always want
to go to you, and ask your advice, and learn to be wise. You will not
turn a cold shoulder on me, will you? I think you yourself realized
that my wish to wait a year before giving a final answer was proof that
I really had not that in my heart which would justify me in saying what
you wished me to say. Oh yes, you knew; and the last day when you bade
me good-bye you almost said as much! I was so young, so