te sorrow of
despair, not the rapture of a granted joy.

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CHAPTER SIX.

ENCHANTMENT.

When a proud woman yields to the entreaties of a lover, she yields with
a grander humility, a more complete self-surrender, than one to whom
coquetry and conquests are natural attributes of vanity.

The Princess Zairoff, to whom men's admiration was as familiar as the
air of Heaven, who possessed rank and wealth and loveliness such as
dower few women, had yet never granted to one human being a sign of
tenderness, or unveiled, so to speak, the deep strange depths of her
strange nature, to any beseechment.

But now, for one brief hour she threw back the portals of emotion. She
was a woman, pure and simple. The man beside her was the one man in the
world to whom her memory had been faithful. Boy and girl they had known
each other in years long past. As boy and girl they had shared in the
same tastes, and been penetrated with the same desires for the Mystic
and the Unknown.

Living in a remote part of India under very careless guardianship, and
with no one to care for their pursuits, or remark them, they had made
the acquaintance of a learned and somewhat mysterious native, and from
his lips they first heard some hints of the wonders that nature reveals
to the earnest student. As time went on they were separated--the boy
was sent to England, the girl remained in the East. When they met again
he was a young lieutenant in an infantry regiment stationed at one of
the most popular stations of a popular Presidency, and she was the
reigning queen of the same station. Again fate parted them. Two years
went by. Their next meeting was in Egypt, where she was travelling with
her guardian.

Julian Estcourt had learnt his heart's secret by then, but there was a
coldness, a strangeness, about the girl who had been his boyhood's
friend that kept him back from anything bearing the imputation of
love-making.

Much as they were together, long and frequent as were their talks, those
talks were yet curiously impersonal for their age and sex, and, however
much the young man's heart might throb with its hidden passion, there
yet lay between them a barrier, a restraint, light, yet strangely
strong, and his lips never dared betray the secret of his long-cherished
devotion.

Another separation--another meeting. Time had worked changes in both.
She was a beautiful