he idea of meeting Carlos de
Metuan brought a shiver of personal distaste.

"I never knew but one real man," she told herself bitterly. "I don't
even know that he was a real man. I wonder if he is still alive." Once
more she was in fancy a little girl, shyly twisting the toe of a rough
shoe in the dust of the mountain roadside. Once more she saw a pair of
eyes that won the heart with their honesty and seemed willing to have
other eyes look through them into a soul concealing nothing. Though
Jefferson Edwardes had been her first flatterer, he had flattered
without ulterior motive. She was a ragged child and he a rich young man
who might have to die. Suddenly she felt that the little girl who was
once herself had been more admirable in every way than this polished
woman who had succeeded her: the woman who was everything that little
girl had yearned to be and who stood self-revealed as brilliant and hard
as one of her own purely decorative diamonds.

A small clock chimed, and, with a somewhat weary step, Mary Burton
crossed the room and rang for her maid.

At dinner and later when the moon had risen and the guests danced on the
smooth mosaic floor of an outdoor pavilion cunningly fashioned in the
semblance of a Greek theater, her eyes were pools of laughter and her
repartee was like wine sparkle--for at least she had learned to act with
the empty bravery of her world.

In the constant attendance of men who chattered compliments she felt a
haunting sense of pursuit and a secret impulse for flight, so that at
the first opportunity she slipped away for the relief of solitude.

There were many vine-embowered retreats about the place where those who
did not wish to dance might talk softly in the blue shadows of Grecian
urns with star-shine and moon-mist for their tete-a-tetes. In such a
place sat Mary Burton, alone--looking about her for a means of more
secure escape. Her imagination kept disturbing her with the figure of a
small girl whose home was a soon-to-be-abandoned farm. A yearning
possessed her for the one thing which she could not command, the sort of
romance that sweeps one away like a torrent. That little girl had
yearned for the gifts of the world, for experience, wealth and
adulation, because she fancied that out of these things came romance and
its prize of happiness. The woman had them all--except the end of them
all for which she had wanted them. They were dulled and tarnished by
satiety and she still crav