ise her speech, and keep the young man in his place, she
laid her hands persuasively upon his shoulders. This brought her
charming face, so pure in outline, set in its aureole of honey-coloured
hair, very near to his, she looking down, he up. And in this position
the two remained longer than was absolutely necessary, silent, quite
still, while the air grew thick with the push of unspoken and as yet
unspeakable matters, and Helen's hands resting upon his shoulders grew
heavy, as the seconds passed, with languorous weight.

"There are better things than crystals to read in, after all, Richard,"
she said at last. Then she lifted her hands almost brusquely and
stepped back. "All the same it is stupid I should have to go away," she
continued, speaking more to herself than to him. "I am happy here. And
when I am happy it's easy to be good--and I like to be good."

She crossed the room and passed behind the bronze Pompeian Antinous.
Under the shadow of the curtains, in the angle of the bay, against the
wainscot, Queen Mary's magic ball showed softly luminous. Helen could
have believed that it watched her. She hesitated before stooping to
pick it up and looked over her shoulder at Richard Calmady. His back
was towards her, his chair close against the table again. He leaned
forward on his elbows, his face buried in his hands. Something in the
bowed head, in the set of the almost crouching figure reassured Madame
de Vallorbes. She picked up the crystal without more ado, with, indeed,
a certain flippancy of gesture. For she had received pleasing assurance
that she had been frightened in the wrong place, and that the eternal
laughter was very completely on her side after all.

And just then a bell had rung in some distant quarter of the great
house. Powell, incarnation of decent punctualities, had appeared.
Whereupon the temperature fell to below normal from fever-heat. Drama,
accentuations of sensibility, in short all the unspoken and
unspeakable, withered as tropic foliage at a touch of frost. No doubt
it was as well, Madame de Vallorbes reflected philosophically, since
the really psychological moment was passed. There had been a dinner
party last night, and----

But here the young lady's reminiscences broke off short. She gathered
up her blue, poplin, scarlet-lined skirts, ran down the steps,
scattering the pea-fowl to right and left, and hastened across the
gravel.

"Wait half a minute for me, dear Aunt Katherine," she cri