n who dealt in lights and shades herself,
was the flattering significance of his words wasted upon her.

"_Tant meiux!_" she said, and, in case he was no French scholar,
repeated it in English, as she held out her slim gloved hand--"All the
better!"

Gay and a man she had been dancing with came out and passed them as
they stood there smiling and touching hands--a handsome, debonair man
and a subtly beautiful woman. Gay took the picture of them home with
her, and stayed long thinking of it when she should have been sleeping.
Long she leaned from her bedroom window, gazing at the great grey
spaces of veld that she loved so much, but seeing them not. All she
could see was Druro's face turned cold, the rocklike expression of his
eyes when he stared at her as though she had been some stranger--she,
who had loved him for years, ever since, as a girl of sixteen, straight
from England and from school, she first saw him and found in his clear,
careless face and fearless ways the crystallization of all her girlish
dreams. Lovely and spirited, decked in the bloom of youth, she had
more, perhaps, than her fair share of admirers and adorers. Every man
who met her fell, to some extent, in love with her. "Gay fever" it was
called; and they all went through it, and some recovered and some did
not. But Gay's fever was for Lundi Druro, though she hid it well
behind locked lips and a sweet, serene gaze. She could not see him
riding down the street, or standing among a group of his fellows (for
other men always clustered about Druro), or even catch a glimpse of his
big red Argyle car standing outside a building, without a tingling of
all the life in her veins.

But she was neither blind nor a fool. Her spirit brooded over Druro
with the half-mystical and half-maternal love that all true women
accord to the beloved; but she knew very well that he had never looked
her way and that the chances were he never might. He was a man's man.
He liked women, and his eyes always lit up when he saw one, but he
forgot all about them when they were not there, forgot them easily in
cards and conviviality and the society of other men. Once, when
someone had attacked him about his indifference to women, he had
answered:

"Why, I adore women! But I prefer the society of men--there are fewer
regrets afterward."

There was no doubt that he exercised a tremendous personal magnetism
upon other men--attracted them, amused them, and influenced them