cause her to long to snatch it from him
and throw it into the sea. But, as it was, she smiled faintly, and
admired openly, and then went to the glass to look at her own nut-
brown tresses. Never had she been so dissatisfied with them, and yet
her hair was considered lovely, and an aesthetic hair-dresser had once
called it a "poem."

"Blind fool," she muttered, stamping her little foot upon the floor,
"why does he torture me so?"

Mildred forgot that all love is blind, and that none was ever blinder
or more headstrong than her own.

And so this second Calypso of a lovely isle set herself almost as
unblushingly as her prototype to get our very unheroic Ulysses into
her toils. And Penelope, poor Penelope, she sat at home and span, and
defied her would-be lovers.

But as yet Ulysses--I mean Arthur--was conscious of none of those
things. He was by nature an easy-going young gentleman, who took
matters as he found them, and asked no questions. And he found them
very pleasant at Madeira, or, rather, at the Quinta Carr, for he did
everything except sleep there. Within its precincts he was everywhere
surrounded with that atmosphere of subtle and refined flattery,
flattery addressed chiefly to the intellect, that is one of the most
effective weapons of a clever woman. Soon the drawing-room tables were
loaded with his favourite books, and no songs but such as he approved
were ordered from London.

He discovered one evening, for instance, that Mildred looked best at
night in black and silver, and next morning Mr. Worth received a
telegram requesting him to forward without delay a large consignment
of dresses in which those colours predominated.

On another occasion he casually threw out a suggestion about the
erection of a terrace in the garden, and shortly afterwards was
surprised to find a small army of Portuguese labourers engaged upon
the work. He had made this suggestion in total ignorance of the
science of garden engineering, and its execution necessitated the
removal of vast quantities of soil and the blasting of many tons of
rock. The contractor employed by Mrs. Carr pointed out how the terrace
could be made equally well at a fifth of the expense, but it did not
happen to take exactly the direction that Arthur had indicated, so she
would have none of it. His word was law, and, because he had spoken,
the whole place was for a month overrun with dirty labourers, whilst,
to the great detriment of Miss Terry's remainin