a chance, I
suppose?" she asked. Lord Tancred wondered at the keenness in her voice.

"Modern artists?" Sir Philip queried. "Perhaps not, though the rich men
are beginning to buy pictures and beautiful things, too; but in a new
country it is the man of sinew and determination, not the dreamer, who
succeeds."

Her head then drooped a little; her interest now seemed only mechanical,
as she answered again, "Yes" and "No."

Lord Tancred wondered and wondered; he saw that her thoughts were far
away.

Francis Markrute had been watching things minutely while he kept up his
suave small talk with Colonel Macnamara on his right hand. He was well
pleased with the turn of events. After all, nothing could have been
better than Zara's being late. Circumstance often played into the hand
of an experienced manipulator like himself. Now if she only kept up this
attitude of indifference, which, indeed, she seemed likely to do--she
was no actress, he knew--things might be settled this very night.

Lord Tancred could not get her to have a single continued conversation
for the remainder of dinner; he was perfectly raging with annoyance, his
fighting blood was up. And when at the first possible moment after the
dessert arrived she swept from the room, her eyes met his as he held the
door and they were again full of contemptuous hate.

He returned to his seat with his heart actually thumping in his side.

And all through the laborious conversation upon Canada and how best to
invest capital, which Francis Markrute with great skill and apparently
hearty friendship prolonged to its utmost limits, he felt the attraction
and irritation of the woman grow and grow. He no longer took the
slightest interest in the pros and cons of his future in the Colony, and
when, at last, he heard the distant tones of Tschaikovsky's _Chanson
Triste_ as they ascended the stairs he came suddenly to a determination.
She was sitting at the grand piano in the back part of the room. A huge,
softly shaded lamp shed its veiled light upon her white face and rounded
throat; her hands and arms, which showed to the elbow, seemed not less
pale than the ivory keys, and those disks of black velvet gazed in front
of them, a whole world of anguish in their depths.

For this was the tune that her mother had loved, and she was playing it
to remind herself of her promise and to keep herself firm in her
determination to accept the bargain, for her little brother Mirko's
sake.