ord's ambitions, and had come to the point where she
delighted in them, and had thought of sharing in them, "for weal or for
woe"; but she would probably have resented the suggestion that his
comparative poverty was weighed against her natural inclinations and
his real and honest passion. For she had her ambitions, too; and when
she had scanned the royal box that night, she had felt that something
only little less than a diadem would really satisfy her.

Then it was that she had turned meditatively towards another occupant
of her box, who sat beside her pretty stepmother--a big, bronzed,
clean-shaven, strong-faced man of about the same age as Ian Stafford of
the Foreign Office, who had brought him that night at her request. Ian
had called him, "my South African nabob," in tribute to the millions he
had made with Cecil Rhodes and others at Kimberley and on the Rand. At
first sight of the forceful and rather ungainly form she had inwardly
contrasted it with the figure of Ian Stafford and that other
spring-time figure of a man at the end of the first row in the stalls,
towards which the prima donna had flashed one trusting, happy glance,
and with which she herself had been familiar since her childhood. The
contrast had not been wholly to the advantage of the nabob; though, to
be sure, he was simply arrayed--as if, indeed, he were not worth a
thousand a year. Certainly he had about him a sense of power, but his
occasional laugh was too vigorous for one whose own great sense of
humour was conveyed by an infectious, rippling murmur delightful to
hear.

Rudyard Byng was worth three millions of pounds, and that she
interested him was evident by the sudden arrest of his look and his
movements when introduced to her. Ian Stafford had noted this look; but
he had seen many another man look at Jasmine Grenfel with just as much
natural and unbidden interest, and he shrugged the shoulders of his
mind; for the millions alone would not influence her, that was sure.
Had she not a comfortable fortune of her own? Besides, Byng was not the
kind of man to capture Jasmine's fastidious sense and nature. So much
had happened between Jasmine and himself, so deep an understanding had
grown up between them, that it only remained to bring her to the last
court of inquiry and get reply to a vital question--already put in a
thousand ways and answered to his perfect satisfaction. Indeed, there
was between Jasmine and himself the equivalent of a betro