a time. And I can assure you that the sea
itself cannot look more wild, more terrifying--with the wrack driving
overhead, and the rain falling in torrents, and the wind whistling
and roaring, and rushing past you as if called by the sea to some
frightful tryst, some horrible orgy of the elements, and striving to
tear you up and carry you with it. Still--still--perhaps it is as
beautiful--then--in its way, as in its season of colour and peace."

"Ah! I knew you would say that." He added in a moment, "You are the
only person that has quoted my lines to me that has not embarrassed me
painfully. For the moment I felt that you had written them, not I!"

"I often used to feel that I had; all, that is----" The magnet of
danger to the curiosity in her feminine soul was irresistible. "All
but your ode to the mate whom you never could find."

And then she turned cold, for she remembered the story of the woman
who had been his ruin. But he did not pale nor shrink; he merely
smiled and his eyes seemed to withdraw still farther away. "Ah! that
woman of whom all poets dream. Perhaps we really find her as we invoke
her for a bit with the pen." Then he broke off abruptly and looked
hard at her, his eyes no longer absent. "You--you----" he began. "Ten
years ago----" And then his face flushed so darkly that Anne laughed
gaily to cover the cold and horror that gripped her once more.

"Ten years ago? I was only twelve! And now--I am made to feel every
day that two-and-twenty is quite old. In three more years I shall be
an orthodox old maid. All the women in Bath House intimate that I am
already beyond the marriageable age."

"The men do not, I fancy!" The poet spoke with the energy of a man
himself. "Besides, I looked--happened to look--through the window of
the saloon one night and saw you talking to no less than four
gallants."

Here she turned away in insufferable confusion, and he, too, seemed to
realise that he had betrayed a deeper interest than he had intended.
With a muttered au revoir he left her, and when she finally turned her
head he was gone. Miss Bargarny was exclaiming:

"Well, dear Lady Hunsdon, he was quite delightful, genteel, altogether
the gentleman. Thank heaven I never heard all those naughty stories,
so I can admire without stint. Did you notice, Mary, how pleased he
was when I recited that couplet?"

"I saw that he was very much embarrassed," replied Lady Mary, who for
an elegiac figure had a surprising re