oundings. "No one could be blamed for climbing a little way out
of the dull world if she held out her hands. I have seen so little
of either of them, Arnold, but I do know that they both of them have
that curious gift--would you call it charm?--the gift of creating
affection. No one has ever spoken to me more kindly and more
graciously than Count Sabatini did when he sat by my side on the
lawn. What is that gift, Arnold? Do you know that with every word he
spoke I felt that he was not in the least a stranger? There was
something familiar about his voice, his manner--everything."

"I think that they are both quite wonderful people," Arnold
admitted.

"Mrs. Weatherley, too, was kind," Ruth went on; "but I felt that
she did not like me very much. She has an interest in you, and like
all women she was a little jealous--not in the ordinary way, I don't
mean," she corrected herself hastily, "but no woman likes any one in
whom she takes an interest to be very kind to any one else."

They had reached the stage of their coffee. The band was playing the
latest waltz. It was all very commonplace, but they were both young
and uncritical. The waltz was one which Fenella had played after
dinner at Bourne End, while they had sat out in the garden,
lingering over their dessert. A flood of memories stirred him. The
soft sensuousness of that warm spring night, with its perfumed
silence, its subtly luxurious setting, stole through his senses like
a narcotic. Ruth was right. It was not to be so easy! He called for
his bill and paid it. Ruth laid her fingers upon his arm.

"Arnold," she began timidly, "there is something more. I scarcely
know how to say it to you and yet it ought not to be difficult. You
talk all the time as though you were my brother, or as though it
were your duty to help me. It isn't so, dear, really, is it? If you
could manage to lend me your room for one week, I think that I might
be able to help myself a little. There is a place the clergyman told
us of who came to see me once--"

Arnold interrupted her almost roughly. A keen pang of remorse
assailed him. He knew very well that if she had not been intuitively
conscious of some change in him, the thought which prompted her
words would never have entered her brain.

"Don't let me hear you mention it!" he exclaimed. "I have made all
the arrangements. It wouldn't do for me to live in an attic now
that I am holding a responsible position in the city. Come along.
Le