ed back across her shoulder. "What
is it, Lord Taborley?"

The calmness of her austerity made emotion seem shallow. There was a
touch of scorn in her repose.

"Won't you help?"

She smiled faintly. "I was. I was going."

"Then please don't. It's late. Both you and she must be worn out."

Like a figure of silver, she came coldly back. But there was only
tenderness in her voice when she spoke. "Terry, did you hear what Lord
Taborley said? He thinks he ought to be going."

Slipping her arm about the girl, she led her from him. Their footsteps
died out on the turret stairs.

He waited, hoping that Lady Dawn would return. Now that she was gone, he
was invaded with his old loneliness. The dead lords eyed him cynically
from their canvases. Through leaded panes the moonlight fell. It seemed
the sorcery of her spirit. The perfume of the rose-garden was her
breath. How pale she had made his dream of Terry! How trivial she made
all women look when she stood beside them! There was nothing in this
gift of youth for which he had clamored. Terry's youth, had he married
her, would have been his scourge. He knew at last what it was that he
required at the hands of a woman--it was rest.

There was no sound. The Castle was intensely still. He lowered the wick
of the lamp before he left, watched the flame splutter and waited till
it sank. Tiptoeing softly down the stairs, he slipped out noiselessly
into the romance of the summer's night.

II

Next morning, for the first few seconds after he had wakened, he lay
wondering why he was so happy. Then he remembered.

He had never had a friendship with a woman. From the start, though he
had hidden the fact from himself, his supposed friendship with Maisie
had been nothing less than lazy courtship. Terry had detected that when
she had said that he wouldn't have been so interested in Maisie if she
hadn't been so desperately good-looking. Until this morning he had had
no faith in such friendships. He had believed that their fundamental
attraction, however well concealed, must always be sex. They could never
be more than a pretense, in which either the man or the woman was
cheating--the one being anxious to give more than friendship, the other
deriving amusement from giving less. He had held that such relations
between men and women were inherently dishonest, doomed to end in a
clash of desire or to broaden into an honorable love affair. There was
no middle course between coveting a w