much comfort and luxury against a background of countless treasures
accumulated throughout the centuries. He had taken an immediate fancy to
Isabel and promised to show her the lower rooms as soon as she tired of
dancing.

Hexam watched her with an amused indulgence that in no wise tempered his
mounting admiration. She was radiant. Her blue eyes were shining and
almost black, her cheeks flooded with a delicate pink. She wore a gown
of white tulle upon whose floating surface were a few dark-blue lilies.
The masses of her black hair were piled on her head in the fashion of
her Californian grandmothers, and confined by a high Spanish comb of
gold and tortoise-shell. Her only other jewel was a long string of Baja
California pearls that had glistened on warm white necks in many an old
California ballroom before ever an American had crossed the threshold of
Arcot Castle. They had been given by Concha Argueello, when she assumed
the gray habit of the Third Order of the Franciscan nuns, to the wife of
her brother Santiago and so had come down to Isabel.

And to-night this descendant of that powerful clan, unimaginable in her
modern complexities to their simple minds, was receiving homage in the
ballroom of one of the greatest houses in Europe. For there was no
question, even in the minds of the young married women, who carry all
before them in English society, that the American girl had created a
furore among the men. Isabel had confided to the duke, who had lunched
that day at Capheaton, and to Hexam, her haunting fear of being a
wall-flower, and both had vowed that she should have no lack of partners
at her first English ball. But to Hexam's disgust, at least, their
solicitude came to an untimely end, and he was able to secure but two
waltzes and a square dance. The duke had spoken for the cotillon, which
he had no intention of dancing. He was a most estimable person, but he
never ignored an opportunity to talk with a new and interesting woman.

Isabel could hardly have failed to be a belle that night, for her spirit
was pitched to a height of joy and triumph that charged her whole being
with a powerful magnetism. Possibly with a presentiment that it was to
be an isolated experience, she abandoned herself recklessly to the mere
delight of living, her will imperious for the fulness of one of the
dearest of girlhood's ideals. She was one of those women, cast, as she
well knew, for tragic and dramatic contacts with life, but Na