s as a
compliment in disguise, then," she said, quite softly. "For truly, when
I come to think of it, were she, herself, here--she, the woman you so
religiously admire that you take elaborate pains to avoid having
anything on earth to do with her--were she herself here you could
hardly take more extensive measures to secure yourself against risk of
disappointment, hardly exercise a greater rage of caution!"

"Perhaps that's just it. Perhaps you have arrived at it all at last.
Perhaps she is here," he said.

And he turned away, steadying himself with one hand against the jamb of
the window, and shuffled out slowly, laboriously, onto the balcony into
the night.

For a quite perceptible length of time Helen de Vallorbes continued to
contemplate the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap.
She followed the lines of the rich pattern--pomegranate, fruit and
blossom, trailing peacock's feather. For by such mechanical employment
alone could she keep the immensity of her excitement and of her triumph
in check. To shout aloud, to dance, to run wildly to and fro, would
have been only too possible to her just then. All that for which she
had schemed, had ruled herself discreetly, had ridden a waiting race,
had been hers, in fact, from the first--the prize adjudged before ever
she left the starting-post. She held this man in the hollow of her
hand, and that by no result of cunning artifice, but by right divine of
beauty and wit and the manifold seductions of her richly-endowed
personality. And, thinking of that, she clenched her dainty fists,
opened them again, and again clenched them, upon the yielding mattress
of the sofa, given over to an ecstasy of physical enjoyment, weaving
even as, with clawed and padded paws, her prototype the she-panther
might. Slowly she raised her downcast eyes and looked after Richard
Calmady, his figure a blackness, as of vacancy, against the elaborate
wrought-ironwork of the balcony. And so doing, an adorable sensation
moved her, at once of hungry tenderness and of fear--fear of something
unknown, in a way fundamental, incalculable, the like of which she had
never experienced before. Ah! indeed, of all her many loves, here was
the crown and climax! Yet, in the midst of her very vital rapture, she
could still find time for remembrance of the little, crescent-shaped
scar upon her temple, and for remembrance of Katherine Calmady, who
had, unwittingly, fixed that blemish upon her and had