feet and was busy
rearranging some roses in the bowl by her side.

"Mr. Strangewey has just come into a large fortune, as you know," she
said. "Probably there are many things to be attended to."

The prince made no further comment. He drew a tortoise-shell-and-gold
cigarette-case from his pocket.

"It is permitted that one smokes?" he inquired.

"It is always permitted to you," was the gracious reply.

"One of my privileges," he remarked, as he blew out the match; "in fact,
almost my only privilege."

She glanced up, but her eyes fell before his.

"Is that quite fair?"

"I should be grieved to do anything or to say anything to you that was
not entirely fair."

She crushed one of the roses to pieces suddenly in her hands and shook
the petals from her long, nervous fingers.

"To-day," she said, "this afternoon--now--you have come to me with
something in your mind, something you wish to say, something you are not
sure how to say. That is, you see, what Henri Graillot calls my
intuition. Even you, who keep all your feelings under a mask, can
conceal very little from me."

"My present feelings," the prince declared, "I do not wish to conceal. I
would like you to know them. But as words are sometimes clumsy, I would
like, if it were possible, to let you see into my heart, or, in these
days, shall I not say my consciousness? I should feel, then, that
without fear of misunderstanding you would know certain things which I
would like you to know."

She came over and seated herself by his side on the divan. She even laid
her hand upon his arm.

"Eugene," she expostulated, "we are too old friends to talk always in
veiled phrases. There is something you have to say to me. I am
listening."

"You know what it is," he told her.

"You are displeased because I have changed my mind about that little
journey of ours?"

"I am bitterly disappointed," he admitted.

She looked at him curiously and then down at her rose-stained fingers.

"That does not sound quite like you," she said. "And yet I ought to know
that sometimes you do feel things, even though you show it so little. I
am sorry, Eugene."

"Why are you sorry?"

"Because I feel that I cannot take that journey."

"You mean that you cannot now, or that you cannot at any time?"

"I do not know," she answered. "You ask me more than I can tell you.
Sometimes life seems so stable, a thing one can make a little chart of
and hang up on the wall, and put one's fin