em. As she held up her long
eye-glass to glance absently at the dancers he was struck by the large
beauty of her arm and the careless assurance of the gesture. There was
nothing nervous or fussy about Coral Hicks; and he was not surprised
that, plastically at least, the Princess Mother had discerned her
possibilities.

Nick Lansing, all that night, sat up and stared at his future. He knew
enough of the society into which the Hickses had drifted to guess that,
within a very short time, the hint of the Prince's aide-de-camp would
reappear in the form of a direct proposal. Lansing himself would
probably--as the one person in the Hicks entourage with whom one
could intelligibly commune-be entrusted with the next step in the
negotiations: he would be asked, as the aide-de-camp would have said,
"to feel the ground." It was clearly part of the state policy of
Teutoburg to offer Miss Hicks, with the hand of its sovereign, an
opportunity to replenish its treasury.

What would the girl do? Lansing could not guess; yet he dimly felt that
her attitude would depend in a great degree upon his own. And he knew
no more what his own was going to be than on the night, four months
earlier, when he had flung out of his wife's room in Venice to take the
midnight express for Genoa.

The whole of his past, and above all the tendency, on which he had once
prided himself, to live in the present and take whatever chances it
offered, now made it harder for him to act. He began to see that he
had never, even in the closest relations of life, looked ahead of his
immediate satisfaction. He had thought it rather fine to be able to give
himself so intensely to the fullness of each moment instead of hurrying
past it in pursuit of something more, or something else, in the manner
of the over-scrupulous or the under-imaginative, whom he had always
grouped together and equally pitied. It was not till he had linked his
life with Susy's that he had begun to feel it reaching forward into a
future he longed to make sure of, to fasten upon and shape to his own
wants and purposes, till, by an imperceptible substitution, that future
had become his real present, his all-absorbing moment of time.

Now the moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it failed him.
He had never before thought about putting together broken bits: he felt
like a man whose house has been wrecked by an earthquake, and who, for
lack of skilled labour, is called upon for the first ti