ough and through, "This afternoon?"

"Yes."

"Paul!" She withdrew from his grasp. In her voice was a touch of
reproach.

"Dearest lady," said he, "I would die rather than marry a rich woman,
ugly or beautiful, if I could not bring her something big in
return--something worth living for."

"You've fold me either too much or too little. Am I not entitled to
know how things stand?"

"You're entitled to know the innermost secrets of my heart," he cried;
and he told thereof as far as his love for the Princess was concerned.

"But, my poor boy," said Ursula tenderly, "how is it all going to end?"

"It's never going to end," cried Paul.

Ursula Winwood smiled on him and sighed a little; for she remembered
the gallant young fellow who had been killed in the Soudan in eighteen
eighty-five.

CHAPTER XV

IT would never end. Why should it? Could a Great Wonder be merely a
transient thrill? Absurd. Dawn followed night, day after day, and the
wonder had not faded. It would never fade. Letter followed letter, each
more precious than the last.

She began with "Mon cher Paul." Then "Mon cher," then sometimes "Paul."
She set the tone of the frank and loyal friendship in a style very
graceful, very elusive, a word of tenderness melting away in a laugh;
she took the friendship, pulled it to pieces and reconstructed it in
ideal form; then she tied blue ribbon round its neck, and showed him
how beautiful it was. She sat on the veranda of her villa and looked'
out on the moonlit Mediterranean and wanted to cry--"J'avais enbie de
Pleurer"--because she was all alone, having entertained at dinner a
heap of dull and ugly people. She had spent a day on the yacht of a
Russian Grand-Duke. "Il m'a fait une cour effrenee"--Paul thirsted
immediately for the blood of this Grand-Duke, who had dared to make
violent love to her. But when, a few lines farther on, he found that
she had guessed his jealousy and laughed at it, he laughed too. "Don't
be afraid. I have had enough of these people." She wanted une ame
sincere et candide; and Paul laid the flattering unction to his own
sincere and candid soul. Then she spoke prettily of his career. He was
to be the flambeau eveilleur, the awakening torch in the darkness
before the daybreak. But he musn't overwork. His health was precious.
There was a blot and erasure in the sentence. He took the letter to the
light, lover-wise, and looked at it through a magnifying glass--and his
pulses thrilled