the ruby and ermine music room was quiet, they
spent an hour there together. He held her hand and she gave him such a
look that he whispered her name aloud. She bent toward him--then
hesitated.

"Did you say 'Kismine'?" she asked softly, "or--"

She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might have misunderstood.

Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the course of an hour
it seemed to make little difference.

The afternoon drifted away. That night, when a last breath of music
drifted down from the highest tower, they each lay awake, happily
dreaming over the separate minutes of the day. They had decided to be
married as soon as possible.

8

Every day Mr. Washington and the two young men went hunting or fishing
in the deep forests or played golf around the somnolent course--games
which John diplomatically allowed his host to win--or swam in the
mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Washington a somewhat
exacting personality--utterly uninterested in any ideas or opinions
except his own. Mrs. Washington was aloof and reserved at all times.
She was apparently indifferent to her two daughters, and entirely
absorbed in her son Percy, with whom she held interminable
conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner.

Jasmine, the elder daughter, resembled Kismine in appearance--except
that she was somewhat bow-legged, and terminated in large hands and
feet--but was utterly unlike her in temperament. Her favourite books
had to do with poor girls who kept house for widowed fathers. John
learned from Kismine that Jasmine had never recovered from the shock
and disappointment caused her by the termination of the World War,
just as she was about to start for Europe as a canteen expert. She had
even pined away for a time, and Braddock Washington had taken steps to
promote a new war in the Balkans--but she had seen a photograph of
some wounded Serbian soldiers and lost interest in the whole
proceedings. But Percy and Kismine seemed to have inherited the
arrogant attitude in all its harsh magnificence from their father. A
chaste and consistent selfishness ran like a pattern through their
every idea.

John was enchanted by the wonders of the chateau and the valley.
Braddock Washington, so Percy told him, had caused to be kidnapped a
landscape gardener, an architect, a designer of state settings, and a
French decadent poet left over from the last century. He had put his
entire force of negroes at their disposal, g