. The judge did not allow
himself the luxury of embarrassment, but bowed to Charley with a
smile, which he presently turned on Kathleen, who came as near being
disconcerted as she had ever been in her life.

Kathleen had passed through a good deal to look so unflurried. She
had been on trial in the court-room as well as the prisoner. Important
things had been at stake with her. She and Charley Steele had known each
other since they were children. To her, even in childhood, he had been
a dominant figure. He had judicially and admiringly told her she was
beautiful--when he was twelve and she five. But he had said it without
any of those glances which usually accompanied the same sentiments in
the mouths of other lads. He had never made boy-love to her, and she had
thrilled at the praise of less splendid people than Charley Steele. He
had always piqued her, he was so superior to the ordinary enchantments
of youth, beauty, and fine linen.

As he came and went, growing older and more characteristic, more and
more "Beauty Steele," accompanied by legends of wild deeds and days
at college, by tales of his fopperies and the fashions he had set, she
herself had grown, as he had termed it, more "decorative." He had told
her so, not in the least patronisingly, but as a simple fact in which
no sentiment lurked. He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever
seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect
pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous
purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself. He had said again and
again, as he grew older and left college and began the business of life
after two years in Europe, that sentiment would spoil her, would scatter
the charm of her perfect beauty; it would vitalise her too much, and her
nature would lose its proportion; she would be decentralised! She had
been piqued at his indifference to sentiment; she could not easily be
content without worship, though she felt none. This pique had grown
until Captain Tom Fairing crossed her path.

Fairing was the antithesis of Charley Steele. Handsome, poor,
enthusiastic, and none too able, he was simple and straightforward, and
might be depended on till the end of the chapter. And the end of it was,
that in so far as she had ever felt real sentiment for anybody, she felt
it for Tom Fairing of the Royal Fusileers. It was not love she felt in
the old, in the big, in the noble sense, but it had behi