work of Fate that instant recognition of her
desirability leaped in his heart, so that some six weeks later they
should set out on their life's journey together on the eastward bound
mail train, which bore, in its foremost van, the mails for the world
outside, gathered in from every district in the region of Calthorpe.

Their happiness was perfect. In six weeks' time the metamorphosis in
the woman had been as complete as it was in the case of the man.

For the man it seemed that life had opened out an entirely new vista.
He had warmed under the influence of his new passion. The angles in
his character seemed to have softened. Achievement had receded into
its due proportion in his focus. The world had become peopled with
warm living creatures whose strivings were now a source of sympathy to
him. Life no longer moved about him detached, unappealing.

So with the woman. Elvine van Blooren's past was her own. Whatever it
was she hugged it to herself, and the very process of doing so had
helped to harden her.

But she possessed fires she had wilfully hidden, even from herself.
For four years she had lived a life of desperate calculation against
all those things she most dreaded, till she felt she had converted
herself into a machine free from all trammeling emotions, equipped
solely to execute the purpose she had set her mind on.

These fires were awakened early. Their awakening had been all unknown
to her. Yet she had admitted them when she had warned her mother that
she intended to "like" the man she ultimately married. All
subconsciously she had "liked" Jeffrey Masters from their first formal
meeting. Further acquaintance had deepened her liking. The keen eyes
possessed strong qualities of appeal. The decision of his clean-cut
face suggested all that strength which appealed to her.

The culmination was reached long before the appointed day of their
wedding. It came at the moment he definitely asked her to become his
wife. It had been a moment to her than which she had dreamed of
nothing more sublime. The flood-gates had been literally forced open
before a tide of sudden passion, which left her gasping, and something
incredulous. Where was all the result of her years of hard
calculation? Where was that machine upon which she had gazed with so
much confident pride? It had only served her just so long as was
required to realize that Jeffrey Masters was sufficiently desirable to
fulfil the purposes o