spirit responded fiercely to this tense demand upon it. The
dread, the panic of the night was gone. The fear that had shaken her
was beaten down like a cowardly dog. Excitement burned in her blood.
Everything depended upon her coolness and her wit, upon a look,
perhaps, the turn of a phrase, the droop of an eye, and she was
passionately resolved that neither coolness nor wit should fail her,
nor words nor looks nor eyes betray the heart of her. She would play
her role with every breath she drew.

* * * * *

She crossed the room at the luncheon summons in the nervous tensity
of mood that an actress might go to play a part in which her career
would live or die. Every half hour with Kerissen was now a duel,
every minute was a stroke to be parried, and she flung herself into
that duel with the desperate exhilaration of such daring. Her hands
were icy, and her cheeks were flaming with the excitement which
consumed her, but she revealed no other trace of it, and she
wondered to herself at the inscrutable fairness of the face which,
looked back at her from the glass.

None of the record of those frightened, sleepless hours was written
there, none of her furious pride, her fixed intensity. Only the soft
shadows under the blue eyes gave her face a look of added delicacy
for all the unnatural flare of brilliant color, and a faint
wistfulness in those eyes seemed to overlay the smiles she
practiced, like a cloud shadow on a brook. And never, never, in all
her glad, care-free days, had she been as distractingly pretty as
she was that moment. With an angry little pang she recognized it,
pinning on the lace hat with its enchanting rose, and then
desperately she resolved to employ it and added two of Kerissen's
pink roses to the costume.

She thought the scene was very like a stage, when she came out
through the narrow door which the old woman unlocked from a key she
carried on a girdle, and slowly descended the stone steps. Beneath
the wide-spreading lebbek a low table was laid for luncheon with two
wicker chairs beside it. The green of the fresh turf was as vivid as
stage grass; the lilies loomed unreally large and white; the
poinsettias flaunted like red paper flowers behind the vivid picture
that the Captain made in a dazzling buff and green uniform picked
out with gold. His bow was theatric, so was the deep look of
exaggerated admiration he bent upon her--it was strange to remember
that her d