iend. Yet Mrs. Mansfield had invited him for her daughter.
Had thought, for which space does not exist, reached across the sea from
child to mother mysteriously, saying to the mother, "Do this!"

But unless the glass told a new tale at seven o'clock Charmian did not
mean to go down to dinner.

She closed her eyes and said to herself, again and again, "Look better!
Look better! Look better!"

CHAPTER X

When seven o'clock struck she got out of bed, and again looked in the
glass. She felt rested in body, and no longer had the tangled sensation
in her head. But the face which confronted her reminded her disagreeably
of Millie Deans, the American singer. It had what Charmian called the
"Pierrot look," a too expressive and unnatural whiteness which surely
told secrets. It seemed to her, too, a hard face, too determined in
expression, repellent almost. And surely nothing is likely to be more
repellent to a man than a girl's face that is hard.

Since her conversation with Susan Fleet by the little lake in the
Algerian garden, Charmian had felt that destiny had decreed her marriage
with Claude Heath. So she put the matter to herself. Really that
conversation had caused her secretly to decide that she would marry
Claude Heath.

"It may be so," Susan Fleet had said. "Perhaps part of your destiny is
to learn through that man, and to teach him."

The words had gone to join the curious conviction that had come to
Charmian out of the white dust floating up from the road that runs
through Mustapha, out of the lilies, out of the wrinkled trunk of the
great palm that was separated by the yellow-green water from all its
fellows, "I shall be here again with him."

Surely the strong assertion of the will is the first step that takes a
human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in
the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with
thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan
Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She
had returned to England, meaning to marry Claude Heath, meaning to use
her will as the ardent and capable servant of her heart.

But what she said to herself was this, "I believe destiny means to bring
us together." She wrapped a naked little fact up in a soft tissue of
romance and wonder.

But the face in the glass which now looked at her was too determined,
too hard. It startled her. And she changed the expr