e you meet him for
the first time under a misconception. Listen, my child! When a young man
is loved equally by both men and women, by both old and young, that
young man is worthy of friendship and trust. Everybody likes Ste. Marie.
In a sense, that is his misfortune. The way is made too easy for him.
His friends stand so thick about him that they shut off his view of the
heights. To waken ambition in his soul he has need of solitude or
misfortune or grief. Or," said the elderly Belgian, laughing gently--"or
perhaps the other thing might do it best--the more obvious thing?"

The girl's raised eyebrows questioned him, and when he did not answer,
she said:

"What thing, then?"

"Why, love," said Baron de Vries. "Love, to be sure. Love is said to
work miracles, and I believe that to be a perfectly true saying. Ah, he
is coming here!"

The Marquise de Saulnes, who was a very pretty little Englishwoman with
a deceptively doll-like look, approached, dragging Ste. Marie in her
wake. She said:

"My dearest dear, I give you of my best. Thank me and cherish him! I
believe he is to lead you to the place where food is, isn't he?" She
beamed over her shoulder and departed, and Miss Benham found herself
confronted by the Spanish-looking man. Her first thought was that he was
not as handsome as he had seemed at a distance, but something much
better. For a young man she thought his face was rather oddly
weather-beaten, as if he might have been very much at sea, and it was
too dark to be entirely pleasing. But she liked his eyes, which were not
brown or black, as she had expected, but a very unusual dark gray--a
sort of slate color. And she liked his mouth, too, while disapproving of
the fierce little upturned mustache which seemed to her a bit operatic.
It was her habit--and it is not an unreliable habit--to judge people by
their eyes and mouths. Ste. Marie's mouth pleased her because the lips
were neither thin nor thick, they were not drawn into an unpleasant line
by unpleasant habits, they did not pout as so many Latin lips do, and
they had at one corner a humorous expression which she found curiously
agreeable.

"You are to cherish me," Ste. Marie said. "Orders from headquarters. How
does one cherish people?" The corner of his very expressive mouth
twitched, and he grinned at her.

Miss Benham did not approve of young men who began an acquaintance in
this very familiar manner. She thought that there was a certain
prelimina