ing, and somehow affecting picture of virile and graceful beauty he
could ever have imagined.

Lord Tybar, who was thirty-two, was debonair and attractive of
countenance to a degree. His eyes, which were grey, were extraordinarily
mirthful, mischievous. A supremely airy and careless and bold spirit
looked through those eyes and shone through their flashes and glints and
sparkles of diamond light. His face was thin and of tanned olive.
His face seemed to say to the world, challengingly, "I am here!
I have arrived! Bring out your best and watch me!" There were
people--women--who said he had a cruel mouth. They said this, not with
censure or regret, but with a deliciously fearful rapture as though the
cruel mouth (if it were cruel) were not the least part of his
attraction.

Lord Tybar's lady, who was twenty-eight, carried in her countenance and
in her hair the pleasing complement of her lord's tan and olive hue and
of his cropped black poll. She was extraordinarily fair. Her skin was of
the hue and of the sheen of creamy silk, and glowed beneath its hue. It
presented amazing delicacy and yet an exquisite firmness. Children,
playing with her, and she delighted in playing with children (but she
was childless), often asked to stroke her face. They would stare at her
face in that immensely absorbed way in which children stare, and then
ask to touch her face and just stroke it; their baby fingers were not
more softly silken. Of her hair Lady Tybar had said frequently, from her
girlhood upwards, that it was "a most sickening nuisance." She bound it
tightly as if to punish and be firm with the sickening nuisance that it
was to her. And these close, gleaming plaits and coils children also
liked to touch with their soft fingers.

Her name was Nona.

Out of a hundred people who passed her by quite a considerable number
would have denied that she was beautiful. Her face was round and saucy
rather than oval and classical. Incontestable the striking attraction of
her complexion and of her hair; but not beautiful,--quite a number would
have said, and did say. Oh, no; pretty, perhaps, in a way, but that's
all.

But her face was much more than beautiful to Sabre.

V

Until this moment, standing there with his bicycle, she on her beautiful
horse, he had not seen her, nor Lord Tybar, for two years. They had been
travelling. Now seeing her, thus unexpectedly and thus gallantly
environed, his mind, with that astonishing precision