bores and unattractive, and sometimes even simply
revolting, like hers? Was it because these beautiful creatures could not
be bound to any one woman? It seemed to her unsophisticated mind that
it could be very nice to be married to one of them; but there was no use
fighting against fate, and she personally was wedded to Josiah Brown.

Lord Bracondale's conversation pleased her. He seemed to understand
exactly what she wanted to talk about; he saw all the things she saw
and--he had read _Jean d'Agreve_!--they got to that at the end of the
first half-hour, and then she froze up a little; some instinct told her
it was dangerous ground, so she spoke suddenly of the weather, in a
banal voice.

Meanwhile, from the beginning of dinner, Lord Bracondale had been saying
to himself she was the loveliest white flower he had yet struck in a
path of varied experiences. Her eyes so innocent and true, with the
tender expression of a fawn; the perfect turn of her head and slender
pillar of a throat; her grace and gentleness, all appealed to him in a
maddening way.

"She is asleep to the whole of life's possibilities," he thought. "What
can her husband be about, and _what_ an intoxicatingly agreeable task to
wake her up!"

He had lived among the world where the awaking of young wives, or old
wives, or any woman who could please man, was the natural course of the
day. It never even struck him then it might be a cruel thing to do. A
woman once married was always fair game; if the husband could not retain
her affections that was his lookout.

Hector Bracondale was not a brute, just an ordinary Englishman of the
world, who had lived and loved and seen many lands.

He read Theodora like an open book: he knew exactly why she had talked
about the weather after _Jean d'Agreve_. It thrilled him to see her soft
eyes dreamy and luminous when they first spoke of the book, and it
flattered him when she changed the conversation.

As for Theodora, she analyzed nothing, she only felt that perhaps she
ought not to speak about love to one of those people who could never be
husbands.

Captain Fitzgerald, meanwhile, was making tremendous headway with the
widow. He flattered her vanity, he entertained her intelligence, and he
even ended by letting her see she was causing him, personally, great
emotion.

At last this promising evening came to an end. The Russian Prince, with
his American Princess, got up to say good-night, and gradually the party