fore said, Carol's moods were
never stationary. She had a mischievous wit and an effervescent,
infectious sprightliness about her--it was a constitutional
characteristic rather than the immediate outcome of gaiety. This made
acquaintances consider her one of the happiest girls in the world. But
of late her friends were prone to notice a suspicious drowsy pinkness of
the eyelids, a sad pucker of the lip corners which argued complexly with
the gusts of exuberance that followed any fit of pre-occupation. And
Yate, as he grew in knowledge of her, could have testified to other
moods still--ugly ones--had he not been too neck-deep in emotion, too
loyal, too profoundly worshipful of the secrets of Nature to notice
anything but beauty in the characteristics of an ungarnished reality
like hers. Besides this, though he was but a youth, he had cosmopolitan
blood in his veins, and cosmopolitan dilution means poetry at a very
early age--poetry which clothes womanhood with mystery, and makes her a
ravishing mixture of puny weakness and irresistible strength. To him she
was the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar, a sign for wonderment and
awe and dumb prostration, a problem too sublime for solution, though the
key to many exalted enigmas lay, alas! merely with Rosser.

Of this Yate suspected a little--a very little. He never fully knew--nor
indeed did she--how far the man was responsible for the development of
the ineradicable events which crowded that autumn-tinted period. Once he
spoke of him. It was when they had rambled from the tennis regions to
where the edge of an adjacent common was banked with trees and dotted
with seats arabesqued with initials by the playful penknives of holiday
hordes. She had been capricious all day--moody, petulant--snappish, in
vulgar phrase.

"Won't you tell me what bothers you?" he said, addressing the coil of
her hair, for her face was bent to some hieroglyphics traced by her
sunshade in the sandy ground.

"You!" she blurted.

"Shall I go?" he asked, meekly. "I've offered to do so often if it would
make you happier."

"It wouldn't--nothing would make me happier."

"Why are you miserable?"

"I'm not," she muttered, and a heavy tear fell with a thud on the back
of her glove.

He lifted the hand to his lips and kissed away the drop before it had
time to sink in.

"Would it make you glad to know that if this were poison I would take
it, to share even so much of you?"

"It _is_ poison, ra