when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of
twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light
intermittently stabbing the murky Gulf, was shut away by drawn blinds,
and the four of them sat in the cosy room eating little cakes and
drinking tea and chatting lightly of things that bulked smaller than the
war.

Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal
technicality over which they had fallen into dispute. Sophie lay back
in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw
through them and into vast distances beyond.

And Thompson sat covertly looking at her profile, the dull gold of her
coiled hair, the red-lipped mouth that was made for kisses and
laughter--and he was glad just to look at her, to be near. For he was
beginning to say to himself that it was no good fighting against fate,
that this girl had put some spell on him from which he would never be
wholly free. Nor did he, in that mood, desire to be free. He wanted that
spell to grow so strong that in the end it would weave itself about her
too, make love beget love. There was quickening in him again that desire
to pursue, to conquer, to possess. The ego in him whispered that once
for a moment Sophie had rested like a homing bird in his arms, and
would, again. But he was not to be betrayed by headlong impulse. The
time was not yet. Instinct warned him that in some fashion, vague,
unrevealed, he had still to prove himself to Sophie Carr. He was aware
intuitively that she weighed him in the balance of cold, critical
reason, against any emotional appeal--just as he, himself, was learning
to weigh things and men. He did not know this. He only felt it. But he
felt sure of his instinct where she was concerned.

And so he was content, for the time, with the privilege of being near
her. Some day--

Sophie looked at him. For the moment his own gaze had wandered from her
to the fire, his mind yielding tentatively to rose-tinted visions.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly.

"I was thinking of you," he answered truthfully.

He looked up as he spoke and his heart leaped at the faint flush that
rose slowly over Sophie's face. Indeed all the high resolve that had
been shaping in his soul for the past ten minutes came near going by the
board. It would have been so easy to imprison the hand that lay along
the chair-arm next his own, to utter words that trembled on his tongue,
to break thr