to
progress beyond the introductory stages of chance meetings and informal
little teas in public, she began clearly to descry enchanting vistas of
better days to come, when the Princess Sofia Vassilyevski would have not
only teas but dinners and dances given in her honour, and would be asked to
spend gay week-ends in the country houses of the people with whom she
contracted the stronger friendships.

But for the immediate present, and especially in the paramount business of
having a good time, Karslake was fairly a necessity. He thought of
everything and forgot nothing, was ever fertile of fresh expedient if the
pastime of a moment began to pall, and was capable of sustained fits of
irresponsible gaiety which enchanted Sofia, so well did they chime with her
own eagerness for sheer fun.

Decidedly she would have been lost without Sybil Waring; but without
Karslake she would have been forlorn.

XI

HEARTBREAK

Not yet prepared to admit it even to herself, in her heart Sofia knew she
prized the companionship of Karslake for something more than the mere
amusement it afforded her: there was a deeper feeling she would not name.
For all that, her times of solitude knew dreams quick and warm with the
thought of Karslake, his words and ways, the gracious little attentions he
had accustomed her to expect of him and which his manner subtly invested
with a personal flavour inexpressibly delightful, indispensably sweet.

Nor did she ever quite forget how long he had worshipped with
unostentatious devotion at her lowly shrine of the caisse in the Cafe des
Exiles, and how shabbily she had rewarded his admiration--never once, in
those many months, with so much as a smile--and how unresentful had been
his acceptance of her half-feigned, half-real indifference to his
existence.

But whenever her reflections took that back-turning she would recall the
man who had talked to Karslake in the cafe, that day so long ago, of his
own humble past as a 'bus-boy in Troyon's in Paris, and who on leaving had
given Sofia herself that odd look of half-recognition tempered by
bewilderment.

She tried once to draw Karslake about this acquaintance of his, but
Karslake's memory proved unusually sluggish.

"No-o," he drawled after a tolerably long pause for thought--"can't say I
place the chap you mean, can't seem somehow to think back that far, you
know. One meets such a lot of people, first and last, they talk such a lot
of tosh--"

"