n fervour, looking straight before her into the
brilliant, shifting crowd.

Paul's pulses quickened. He saw possibilities ahead.

"Do you mean----? Would you be content to live there--for good?"

His tone caught her attention, and she turned to him with
disconcerting directness of gaze.

"Yes," she said quietly, "I would be quite content to live on the
Frontier--with John, if only he would have me. Now we might surely go
on dancing, Major Wyndham."

Paul put his arm about her in silence. His time had not yet come; and
he took up his burden of waiting again, if with less hope, yet with
undiminished resolve.

Honor, meanwhile, had leisure to wonder whether she had imagined that
new note in his voice. If not,--and if he were to repeat the question
in a more definite form--how should she answer him?

In truth she could not tell. Sincere admiration is not always easy to
distinguish from love of a certain order. But Paul's bearing through
the remainder of the dance convinced her that she must have been
mistaken, and she dismissed the subject from her mind.

Leaving her in charge of Desmond, Wyndham slipped on his greatcoat,
and spent half an hour pacing to and fro, in the frosty darkness,
spangled with keen stars. Here, forgetful of expectant partners, he
took counsel with his cigar and his own sadly sobered heart. More than
once he asked himself why those months on the Frontier had been among
the best in Honor Meredith's life. The fervour of her tone haunted him
with uncomfortable persistence; yet, had he put the question to her,
it is doubtful whether she could have given him a definite answer,
even if she would.

But although the lights and music and laughter had lost their meaning
for him, the great ball of the year went forward merrily in regular
alternations of sound and silence, of motion and quiescence, to its
appointed end.

It was during one of the intervals, when eye and ear enjoyed a passing
respite from the whirling wheel of things, that Desmond, coming out of
the cardroom--where he had been enjoying a rubber and a
cigarette--caught sight of a gleaming figure standing alone in the
pillared entrance to the Hall, and hurried across the deserted
ballroom. His wife looked pathetically small and unprotected in the
wide emptiness of the archway, and the corners of her mouth quivered
as though tears were not far off.

"Oh, Theo,--I _am_ glad!" she said as he reached her side. "I wanted
you--long ago, but