shamming or an evanescent preference--for one of them
above another. Sir Vane Masham set her down over his third dinner's
sherry as "an iceberg," in which kind opinion the little viscount
joined, with the amendment of "polar refrigerator." Young Arthur
French, who was very hard hit indeed, said she was like a "beautiful,
heartless marble statue," but the poet, who had made verses on her,
called her a "white lily with a heart of flame."

Not one of them all, however, could dispute the perfect quality of her
beauty to-night. In a robe of violet satin, with pale jealous topazes
shining on her neck and arms and in the sleek braids of her dark hair,
Hyacinthe was fit for the regards of emperors had they been there to
see. They were not. In the conservatory at Stokeham, where she stood
amid the tropical trees and flowers and breathing the warm close scent
of rich blossoms foreign to English soil, there was only one man to
look at her, and he was no potentate, but a blond young fellow, with
blue blood in his veins and a sad riot in his heart.

For the first time since they have been in the house together he has
left his betrothed wife's side and sought hers: in the face of this
little watching world about him he has, at last, quietly risen from
the seat at Florence Ffolliott's side and followed that trail of
sheeny satin into the conservatory. "Not one word for me?" he says in
a low voice that has in it a sort of desperation.

She turns startled and looks at him: "Who wants me? Who sent you to
fetch me?"

"No one 'sent' me," he replies bitterly: "I 'want' you. Hyacinthe!
Hyacinthe!" He stretches two arms out toward her, and when he dies
Roy Chandoce remembers the look that leaps then into the eyes of this
girl.

"Do not touch me!" She shrinks away with the expression of awakened
womanhood on her fair face. "If you do, you will make me mad." For he
has followed and is close to her.

"No, no, no! Not 'mad'--happy! Ah, Hyacinthe!" His arms are no more
outstretched or empty: they enfold all the beauty and all the
bliss that now and then give mortality fresh faith in heaven. "Ah,
Hyacinthe!" That is all that he says, and she is silent while his
kisses fall upon her mouth and cheeks and brow and hands.

And when, ten minutes later, he goes back where he came from, he knows
that it is no "intellectual disloyalty" that lured him from his seat:
he knows that the poet was right, and Vane and the viscount and Arthur
all wrong.