of her hand he was gone.

Harriet found to her joyous surprise her dressing room transformed into
a bower of roses. A great bouquet of three dozen American beauties on
her table bore her father's name and all the rest were from Stuart. She
had a vague surmise that he paid for her father's, too. Every tint of
rose that blooms he had sent, hiring an artist to arrange them so that
their colouring made a veritable song of joy as she entered. There was
no card to indicate who had sent these wonderful flowers, but she knew.
There was only one man on earth who loved her well enough. Her heart
gave a throb of daring joy at the thought! Surely such a token meant
more than merely the big brotherly tenderness which he assumed so
naturally. And then her heart sank with the certainty that he didn't
mean it in the deep sense she wished. He called her 'dear,' and
'dearie,' and 'little pal' too glibly. He had always told her that he
loved her too easily. What she wished was the speech that stammered and
halted and uttered itself in broken, half-articulate syllables because
there were no words in the human language to express its meaning.

She buried her golden head in a huge bunch of white roses the artist
had placed in the centre of the room, drinking their perfume for a
moment, closing her eyes and breathing deeply.

"I wonder if he does think of me still as a child?" she mused. "I
wonder if he never suspects the storm within? Well----"

She smiled triumphantly.

"I'll tell him something to-night in my song!"

Nan was not in an amiable mood when Stuart led her to the box in the
millionaire's playhouse which New York society built to exhibit its
gowns, jewellery and beautiful women.

He had insisted on coming early.

Nan had always entered late and no woman in the magic circle of gilded
splendour had ever attracted more attention or received it with more
queenly indifference. It was acknowledged on every hand that she was
the most beautiful woman in New York's exclusive set.

Northern men had exhausted their vocabulary of flattery in paying
homage to the perfection of her stately Southern type. Those big
Northern business fellows had often shown a preference for Southern
women. Many of them had married poor girls of the South and they had
become the leaders of their set. Nan's opportunity for intrigue and
flirtation had been boundless, but so far not a whisper about her had
ever found its way into the gossip of the scandalm