“Why?” she asked, turning her eyes on him for the first time.

Howard was silent for a moment, then he looked at her with a curious gravity.

“Because it would be good for him:  because I am afraid for him.”

“Afraid?” she echoed.

“Yes,” he said, with a nod.  “Some day he will run against something that will bring him to smash.  Some woman—­But I beg your pardon.  Do you know, Miss Falconer, that you have a dangerous way of leading one to speak the truth—­which one should never—­or very rarely—­do.  Why, on earth am I telling you all this about Stafford Orme?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“You were saying ‘some woman,’” she said.

He gave a sigh of resignation.

“You are irresistible!  Some woman who will be quite unworthy of him.  It’s always the case.  The block of ice you can not smash with your biggest hammer is broken into smithereens by a needle.  That’s the peril before Stafford—­but let us hope he will prove the exception to the rule and escape.  He’s safe at present, at any rate.”

She though of the scene she had witnessed, the girl sitting sideways on Stafford Orme’s horse, and her face flushed for an instant.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Quite!” he responded, confidently.  “I know all Stafford’s flirtations, great and small:  if there was anything serious he would tell me; and as he hasn’t—­there isn’t.”

She laughed; the slow, soft laugh which made Howard think suddenly, strangely, of a sleepy tigress he had once watched in a rajah’s zoo, as she lay basking in the sun:  a thing of softness and beauty and—­death.

“We’ve had a most amusing conversation, Mr. Howard,” she said.  “I don’t know when I’ve been so interested—­or so tempted.”

“Tempted?” He looked at her with a slow, expectant smile.

“Oh, yes,” she murmured, turning her eyes upon him with a half-mocking light in them.  “You have forgotten that you have been talking to a woman.”

“I don’t deny it,” he said.  “It’s the finest compliment I could pay you.  But—­after?”

“And that to a woman your account of your hero-friend is—­a challenge.”

He nodded and paused, with his cigar half-way to his lips.

“I’m greatly tempted to accept it, do you know!” she said.

He laughed.

“Don’t:  you’ll be vanquished.  Is that too candid, too—­brutal?” he said.

“So brutal that I will accept it,” she said.  “Is that ring of yours a favorite?”

“I’ve had it ever since I can remember.  It was my mother’s,” he said, rather gravely.

She held out her hand, upon which the costly gems glittered in the sunlight.

“Choose one to set against it,” she said quite quietly.

Howard, roused for once from his sleepy cynicism, met her gaze with something like astonishment.

“You mean—?” he said, in a low voice.