elle," exclaimed the little French woman who had put by
dreams of a small millinery shop in Paris to come with her mistress to
America, "dinner is not far off, and you are not yet dressed."

Mary Burton did not answer. Her thoughts were elsewhere and after a
moment's hesitation Julie went out and closed the door quietly behind
her. The pearls lying near the mirror caught the light and echoed it in
their soft shimmer.

"Hamilton Burton's collar," she murmured.

Then she slowly drew from the envelope in her lap a letter.

Its writer subscribed himself with many adoring superlatives, "Thy
Carlos," but that was an abbreviated signature. In Andalusia, where his
estates lay, his prerogative was to sign himself Juan Carlos Matisto y
Carolla, Duke de Metuan.

She read the letter and let it fall from her listless fingers. Her eyes
went again to the portrait in the glass. Very slowly she rose and
studied herself standing. The lacy softness of her negligee fell away
from her slenderly rounded throat. The creamy whiteness of arms and
shoulders and bosom was touched with the rosiness of blossom petals.

"I suppose," she said with a short laugh, "I suppose--as men's ideas of
women go--I'm worth possessing." Then she turned impatiently to the
window and stood with one arm high above her head, resting on the white
woodwork of its frame. While her eyes went off to the sunset, they
became hungry for something she did not have, she who had so much.

In a few days, unless she forbade it, the duke would arrive, this note
from his New York hotel announced. There had been also a brief
communication from Hamilton, which she had angrily torn into small bits.
The duke had called on him, said her brother, and craved permission to
pay his addresses to Mary. Hamilton Burton had granted the boon with the
manner of a king contemplating a noble alliance in his family. Mary
Burton did not care for the manner.

It complicated matters, she admitted, that she herself had not precisely
discouraged the duke over there in Cairo and in Nice. He had fitted
rather comfortably into the artificial life she had been living, which
she had not then begun to question with analysis. As she looked back she
could not recall that she had definitely discouraged any of those titled
suitors. Now that her brain had turned on her, forcing her to take stock
of her life, many shapes and colors changed, as the light of day alters
the aspect of gas and bares its deceit. T