was most anxious to
escape. But now she was becoming more fastidious. The school teachers
and the dagos fascinated her no longer. Her soldier friends had
introduced her into Embassy circles, and she wished to remain there.
She fixed on Aubrey Laking for her next attempt, but from him she
received her first rebuff. Having lured him into a _tete-a-tete_, as
her method was, she asked him for counsel in the conduct of her life.

"If I were you," he said dryly, "I should go to Paris or New York. You
will find much more scope there."

Fortunately fate soon exchanged Aubrey Laking for Reggie Forsyth. He
was just what suited her--for a time. But a certain impersonality in
his admiration, his fits of reverie, the ascendancy of music over his
mind, made her come to regret her more masculine lovers. And it was
just at this moment of dissatisfaction that she first saw Geoffrey
Barrington, and thought how lovely he would look in his uniform. From
that moment desire entered her heart. Not that she wanted to lose
Reggie; the peace and harmony of his surroundings soothed her like a
warm and scented bath. But she wanted both. She had had two before,
and had found them complimentary to one another and agreeable to her.
She wanted to sit on Geoffrey's knee and to feel his strong arms round
her. But she must not be too sudden in her advances, or she would lose
him as she had lost Laking.

It is easy to condemn Yae as a bad girl, a born _cocotte_. Yet such
a judgment would not be entirely equitable. She was a laughter-loving
little creature, a child of the sun. She never sought to do harm to
anybody. Rather was she over-amiable. She wished above all to make
her men friends happy and to be pleasing in their eyes. She was never
swayed by mercenary motives. She was to be won by admiration, by good
looks, and by personal distinction, but never by money. If she tired
of her lovers somewhat rapidly, it was as a child tires of a game or
of a book, and leaves it forgotten to start another.

She was a child with bad habits, rather than a mature sinner. It never
occurred to her that, because Geoffrey Harrington was married, he at
least ought to be immune from her attack. In her dreams of an earthly
paradise there was no marrying or giving in marriage, only the
sweet mingling of breath, the quickening of the heart-beats like the
pulsation of her beloved motor-car, the sound as of violin arpeggios
rising higher and ever higher, the pause of the ec