and carefully shutting it--he had
once been Mystery's high priest and had held the keys of Joy. To-day,
beyond a faint pallor, there was no trace of emotion in that face that
was the same and yet so different. Not even anger there. Where a less
complex man would have brought in, if not the menace of a storm, at
least an intimation of masterfulness that should advertise the
uselessness of opposition, Stonor brought a subtler ally in what, for
lack of better words, must be called an air of heightened
fastidiousness--mainly physical. Man has no shrewder weapon against the
woman he has loved and wishes to exorcise from his path. For the simple,
and even for those not so much simple as merely sensitive, there is
something in that cool, sure assumption of unapproachableness on the
part of one who once had been so near--something that lames advance and
hypnotizes vision. Geoffrey Stonor's aloofness was not in the 'high
look' alone; it was as much as anything in the very way he walked, as if
the ground were hardly good enough, in the way he laid his shapely hand
on the carved back of the sofa, the way his eyes rested on inanimate
things in the room, reducing whoever was responsible for them to the
need of justifying their presence and defending their value.

As the woman in the chair, leaning cheek on hand, sat silently watching
him, it may have been that obscure things in those headlong hours of the
past grew plainer.

However ludicrous the result may look in the last analysis, it is clear
that a faculty such as Stonor's for overrating the value of the
individual in the scheme of things, does seem more effectually than any
mere patent of nobility to confer upon a man the 'divine right' to
dictate to his fellows and to look down upon them. The thing is founded
on illusion, but it is founded as firm as many another figment that has
governed men and seen the generations come to heel and go crouching to
their graves.

But the shining superiority of the man seemed to be a little dimmed for
the woman sitting there. The old face and the new face, she saw them
both through a cloud of long-past memories and a mist of present tears.

'Well, have they primed you?' she said very low. 'Have you got your
lesson--by heart at last?'

He looked at her from immeasurable distance. 'I am not sure that I
understand you,' he said. He waited an instant, then, seeing no
explanation vouchsafed, 'However unpropitious your mood may be,' he went
on