verything they look upon, the light in which ebbs and flows with every
changing tide of the soul,--these you have to love to know, and to
worship to portray.

Now the face of Nicolete, as I learnt in time to call her, was just
soul and bloom, perhaps mainly bloom. I never noticed whether she had
any other features except her eyes. I suppose she had a nose; a little
lace pocket-handkerchief I have by me at the moment is almost too small
to be evidence on that important point.

As I walked by her side that May morning, I was only conscious of her
voice and her exquisite girlhood; for though she talked with the APLOMB
of a woman of the world, a passionate candour and simple ardour in her
manner would have betrayed her, had her face not plainly declared her
the incarnation of twenty. But if she were twenty years young, she was
equally twenty years OLD; and twenty years old, in some respects, is
the greatest age attained to by man or woman. In this she rather
differed from Alastor, of whom otherwise she was the female
counterpart. Her talk, and something rather in her voice than her
talk, soon revealed her as a curious mixture of youth and age, of
dreamer and desillusionee.

One soon realised that she was too young, was hoping too much from
life, to spend one's days with. Yet she had just sufficiently that
touch of languor which puts one at one's ease, though indeed it was
rather the languor of waiting for what was going to happen than the
weariness of experience gone by. She was weary, not because of the
past, but because the fairy theatre of life still kept its curtain
down, and forced her to play over and over again the impatient overture
of her dreams.

I have no doubt that it was largely nervousness that kept the
mysterious playwright so long fumbling behind the scenes, for it was
obvious that it would be no ordinary sort of play, no every-day
domestic drama, that would satisfy this young lady, to whom life had
given, by way of prologue, the inestimable blessing of wealth, and the
privilege, as a matter of course, of choosing as she would among the
grooms (that is, the bride-grooms) of the romantic British aristocracy.

She had made youth's common mistake of beginning life with books, which
can only be used without danger by those who are in a position to test
their statements. Youth naturally believes everything that is told it,
especially in books.

Now, books are simply professional liars about life, a