he broad coping,--"even in small details of dress."

He looked away over the immense and radiant prospect, and then up at
the radiant woman in her vesture of turquoise, pink, and gold.

And, so doing, for the first time his face relaxed, being lighted up by
a flickering, mocking smile. And something in his shuffling movements,
in the fine irony of his expression, pierced Helen with a sensation
hitherto unknown, broke up the absoluteness of her egotism, stirred her
blood. She forgot resentment in an absorbed and absorbing interest. The
ordinary man of the world she knew as thoroughly as her old shoe. Such
an one presented small field of discovery to her. But this man was
unique in person, and promised to be so in character also. Her
curiosity regarding him was profound. For the moment it sunk all
personal considerations, all humorous or angry criticism, either of her
own attitude towards him or of his attitude towards her. Silently she
came forward, sat down on the marble bench, close to where he stood,
and, turning sideways, leaned her elbows upon the top of the balustrade
beside him. She looked up now, rather than down at him, and it went
home to her, had nature spared him infliction of that hideous
deformity, what a superb creature physically he would have been! There
was a silence, Helen remaining intent, quiet, apprehension and
imagination sensibly upon the stretch.

At last Richard spoke abruptly.

"By the way, did you happen to observe the decorations of your room? Do
you like them?"

"Yes and no," she answered. "They struck me as rather wonderful, but
liable to induce dreams of Scylla and Charybdis, of the Fata Morgana,
and other inconvenient accidents of the deep. Fortunately I was too
tired last night to be excursive in fancy, or I might have slept badly.
You have gathered all the colours of the ocean and fixed them, somehow,
on those carpets and hangings and strangely frescoed walls."

"You saw that?"

"How could I fail to see it, since you kindly excuse me of being, or
ever having been, a simpleton?"--Helen spoke lightly, tenderly almost.
An overmastering desire to please had overtaken her. "You have employed
a certain wizardry in the furnishing of that room," she continued. "It
lays subtle influences upon one. What made you think of it?"

"A dream, an idea, which has stuck by me queerly, though all other fond
things of the sort were pitched overboard long ago. I suppose one is
bound to be illogical