nd of all desire."

Helen did not raise her head.

"Alas! if those are the conditions of revelation my chances of seeing
are extremely limited. To purify one's mind of all desire is to commit
emotional suicide. Of course I desire, all the while I desire. And
equally, of course, you desire. Every one who is human and in their
sober senses must do that. Absence of desire means idiotcy, or----"

"Or what?"

For an instant she looked up at him, a very devil of dainty malice in
her expression, in the shrug of her shoulders too, beneath their fine
laces and the affected sobriety of that same dull-blue, poplin gown.

"Or priestly, saintly middle-age--from which may heaven in its mercy
ever deliver us," she said.

Richard shifted his position a little, gathering himself back from her
so near neighbourhood--a fact of which the young lady was not unaware.

"I'm not quite sure whether I echo your prayer," he said slowly. "I
doubt whether that attitude, or one approximate to it, is not the
safest and best for some of us."

"Safest, no doubt." Madame de Vallorbes' eyes were bent on the crystal
sphere again. "As it is safer to decline a duel, than go out and meet
your man. Best? On that point you must permit me to hold my own
opinion. The word best has many readings according to the connection in
which it is employed. Personally I should always fight."

"Whatever the odds?"

"Whatever the odds."--And almost immediately Madame de Vallorbes
uttered a little cry, curiously at variance with her bold words.
"Something is moving inside the crystal, something is coming. I don't
half like it, Richard. Perhaps we are tempting Providence. Yes, it
moves, it moves, like mist rising off a river. It is poisonous. Some
woman has looked into this before--a woman of my temperament--and read
an evil fortune. I know it. Tell me quick, how did the crystal come
here, to whom did it belong?"

"To Mary Stuart--Mary, Queen of Scots," Dickie said.

"Ah! unhappy woman, ill-omened woman. You should have told me that
before and I would never have looked. Here take it, take it. Lock it
up, hide it. Let no woman ever look in it again."

As she spoke Helen crossed herself hastily, pushing the magic ball
towards him. But, as though endowed with life and volition of its
own--or was it merely that Dick's hand was even yet not quite of the
steadiest?--it evaded his grasp, fell off the table edge and rolled,
gleaming moonlike, far across the floor, away