by the first
touch of Brenda's hand, and the first meeting of their eyes, was
something very different from the tenderly respectful admiration, the
real friendship, inevitably exalted by the magic of sex, which, as he
saw now, he had innocently mistaken for love.

He managed quite adroitly to separate Brenda from the circle, and to
lure her into a stroll about the outside grounds, during which he told
her the history and traditions of "The Wilderness" not, of course,
omitting the sad little tragedy of the Lady Alicia, all of which Miss
Brenda listened to with an interest which was not, perhaps, wholly
derived from the story itself. She had never yet met any one who was
quite like this learned, much-travelled, quiet-spoken young aristocrat.
On her father's side she was descended from one of the oldest
Knickerbocker families in the State of New York and her aristocracy
responded instinctively to his, and formed a first bond between them.

It need hardly be said that her beauty and her prospective wealth, to
say nothing of the bright, mental, and intellectual atmosphere in which
she seemed to live and move, had attracted to her many men whom she had
inspired with a very genuine desire to link their lives with hers. She
was only twenty-two, but she had already refused more than one coronet
of respectable dignity, and so far her heart had remained as virgin as
it was when she had admired herself in her first long skirt. But now,
for the first time in her life, she began to feel a strange disquietude
in the presence of a man, and a man, too, whom she had not known for an
hour. Nitocris had, happily, told her nothing of what had passed between
Lord Leighton and herself, and so the pleasant element in her
disquietude was entirely unalloyed.

Her father was already too deeply engrossed in learned converse with his
brother professors to take any notice of the great fact which was
beginning to get itself accomplished; but her mother's instinct
instantly noticed the subtle change that had come over her daughter,
and she saw it with anything but displeasure. All sensible mothers of
beautiful daughters are discreetly sanguine. She was far too wise in her
generation not to have agreed with Brenda's decision in certain former
cases. The idea of her daughter's beauty and her father's millions being
bartered for mere rank and social power, however splendid, was utterly
repugnant to her. She had married for love, and she wanted Brenda