nd satisfaction
which in a less handsome man would have been almost a leer. His name
was Adrian Fellowes.

Either the opera and the singer had no charms for Adrian Fellowes, or
else he had heard both so often that, without doing violence to his
musical sense, he could afford to study the effect of this wonderful
effort upon the mob of London, mastered by the radiant being on the
stage. Very sleek, handsome, and material he looked; of happy colour,
and, apparently, with a mind and soul in which no conflicts ever
raged--to the advantage of his attractive exterior. Only at the summit
of the applause did he turn to the stage again. Then it was with the
gloating look of the gambler who swings from the roulette-table with
the winnings of a great coup, cynical joy in his eyes that he has
beaten the Bank, conquered the dark spirit which has tricked him so
often. Now the cold-blue eyes caught, for a second, the dark-brown eyes
of the Celtic singer, which laughed at him gaily, victoriously,
eagerly, and then again drank in the light and the joy of the myriad
faces before her.

In a box opposite the royal box were two people, a man and a very young
woman, who also in the crise of the opera were not looking at the
stage. The eyes of the man, sitting well back--purposely, so that he
might see her without marked observation--were fixed upon the
rose-tinted, delicate features of the girl in a joyous blue silk gown,
which was so perfect a contrast to the golden hair and wonderful colour
of her face. Her eyes were fixed upon her lap, the lids half closed, as
though in reverie, yet with that perspicuous and reflective look which
showed her conscious of all that was passing round her--even the effect
of her own pose. Her name was Jasmine Grenfel.

She was not oblivious of the music. Her heart beat faster because of
it; and a temperament adjustable to every mood and turn of human
feeling was answering to the poignancy of the opera; yet her youth,
child-likeness, and natural spontaneity were controlled by an elate
consciousness. She was responsive to the passionate harmony; but she
was also acutely sensitive to the bold yet deferential appeal to her
emotions of the dark, distinguished, bearded man at her side, with the
brown eyes and the Grecian profile, whose years spent in the Foreign
Office and at embassies on the Continent had given him a tact and an
insinuating address peculiarly alluring to her sex. She was well aware
of Ian Staff