of thine,
At least I fill a place where white dreams dwell,
And wreathe an unseen shrine."

"'And Love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.... There is no help
for these things, none to mend and none to mar....'" A sob rose in her
throat. "Oh, the beauty of it, the beauty and the misery and the
despair of it!" she murmured.

Slowly she wound and wound the coil of golden hair about her neck,
drawing it tighter, fold on fold, tighter and tighter.

"This would be the easiest way--this," she whispered. "By my own hair!
Beauty would have its victim then. No one would kiss it any more,
because it killed a woman.... No one would kiss it any more."

She felt the touch of Ian Stafford's lips upon it, she felt his face
buried in it. Her own face suffused, then Adrian Fellowes' white rose,
which Rudyard had laid upon her pillow, caught her eye where it lay on
the floor. With a cry as of a hurt animal she ran to her bed, crawled
into it, and huddled down in the darkness, shivering and afraid.

Something had discovered her to herself for the first time. Was it her
own soul? Had her Other Self, waking from sleep in the eternal spaces,
bethought itself and come to whisper and warn and help? Or was it
Penalty, or Nemesis, or that Destiny which will have its toll for all
it gives of beauty, or pleasure, or pride, or place, or pageantry?

"Love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom"--

The words kept ringing in her ears. They soothed her at last into a
sleep which brought no peace, no rest or repose.

CHAPTER XVIII

LANDRASSY'S LAST STROKE

Midnight--one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock. Big Ben boomed the
hours, and from St. James's Palace came the stroke of the quarters,
lighter, quicker, almost pensive in tone. From St. James's Street below
came no sounds at last. The clatter of the hoofs of horses had ceased,
the rumble of drays carrying their night freights, the shouts of the
newsboys making sensation out of rumours made in a newspaper office,
had died away. Peace came, and a silver moon gave forth a soft light,
which embalmed the old thoroughfare, and added a tenderness to its
workaday dignity. In only one window was there a light at three
o'clock. It was the window of Ian Stafford's sitting-room.

He had not left the Foreign Office till nearly ten o'clock, then had
had a light supper at his club, had written letters there, and after a
long walk up and down the Mall had, with reluctant feet, gone t