thal. He had
asked her to marry him, and she had not said no; but she had bargained
for time to "prepare"; that she should have another year in which to be
gay in a gay world and, in her own words, "walk the primrose path of
pleasure untrammelled and alone, save for my dear friend Mrs. Grundy."

Since that moment he had been quite sure that all was well. And now the
year was nearly up, and she had not changed; had, indeed, grown more
confiding and delicately dependent in manner towards him, though seeing
him but seldom alone.

As Ian Stafford looked at her now, he kept saying to himself, "So
exquisite and so clever, what will she not be at thirty! So well
poised, and yet so sweetly child-like dear dresden-china Jasmine."

That was what she looked like--a lovely thing of the time of Boucher in
dresden china.

At last, as though conscious of what was going on in his mind, she
slowly turned her drooping eyes towards him, and, over her shoulder, as
he quickly leaned forward, she said in a low voice which the others
could not hear:

"I am too young, and not clever enough to understand all the music
means--is that what you are thinking?"

He shook his head in negation, and his dark-brown eyes commanded hers,
but still deferentially, as he said: "You know of what I was thinking.
You will be forever young, but yours was always--will always be--the
wisdom of the wise. I'd like to have been as clever at twenty-two."

"How trying that you should know my age so exactly--it darkens the
future," she rejoined with a soft little laugh; then, suddenly, a cloud
passed over her face. It weighed down her eyelids, and she gazed before
her into space with a strange, perplexed, and timorous anxiety. What
did she see? Nothing that was light and joyous, for her small sensuous
lips drew closer, and the fan she held in her lap slipped from her
fingers to the floor.

This aroused her, and Stafford, as he returned the fan to her, said
into a face again alive to the present: "You look as though you were
trying to summon the sable spirits of a sombre future."

Her fine pink-white shoulders lifted a little and, once more quite
self-possessed, she rejoined, lightly, "I have a chameleon mind; it
chimes with every mood and circumstance."

Suddenly her eyes rested on Rudyard Byng, and something in the rough
power of the head arrested her attention, and the thought flashed
through her mind: "How wonderful to have got so much at thirty-three!
T