“Better decently dead than publicly paragraphed....  I haven’t the least idea that this thing is going to drop....  Anyway, it’s worth it,” he added, rather vaguely.

“Worth—­what?” she asked, looking into his rather winning, brown eyes.

“Being here,” he said, looking into her engaging gray ones.

After a startling silence she said calmly:  “Will you promise me not to move or shake the car till I return?”

“You won’t be very long, will you?”

“Not—­very,” she replied faintly.

She walked into the library, halted in the center of the room, hands clasped behind her.  Her heart was beating like a trip hammer.

“I might as well face it,” she said to herself; “he is—­by far—­the most thoroughly attractive man I have ever seen....  I—­I don’t know what’s the matter,” she added piteously.... “if it’s that machine William made I can’t help it; I don’t care any longer; I wish——­”

A sharp crack from the landing sent her out there in a hurry, pale and frightened.

“Something snapped somewhere,” explained the young man with forced carelessness, “some unimportant splinter gave way and the thing slid down an inch or two.”

“D-do you think——­”

“No, I don’t.  But it’s perfectly fine of you to care.”

“C-care?  I’m a little frightened, of course....  Anybody would be....  Oh, I wish you were out and p-perfectly safe.”  “If I thought you could ever really care what became of a man like me——­”

Killian Van K. Vanderdynk’s aristocratic senses began gyrating; he grasped the bars, the back of his hand brushed against hers, and the momentary contact sent a shock straight through the scion of that celebrated race.

She seated herself abruptly; a delicate color grew, staining her face.

Neither spoke.  A long, luminous sunbeam fell across the landing, touching the edge of her hair till it glimmered like bronze afire.  The sensitive mouth was quiet, the eyes, very serious, were lifted from time to time, then lowered, thoughtfully, to the clasped fingers on her knee.

Could it be possible?  How could it be possible?—­with a man she had never before chanced to meet—­with a man she had seen for the first time in her life only an hour or so ago!  Such things didn’t happen outside of short stories.  There was neither logic nor common decency in it.  Had she or had she not any ordinary sense remaining?

She raised her eyes and looked at the heir of the Vanderdynks.

Of course anybody could see he was unusually attractive—­that he had that indefinable something about him which is seldom, if ever, seen outside of fiction or of Mr. Gibson’s drawings—­perhaps it is entirely confined to them—­except in this one very rare case.

Sacharissa’s eyes fell.

Another unusual circumstance was engaging her attention, namely, that his rather remarkable physical perfection appeared to be matched by a breeding quite as faultless, and a sublimity of courage in the face of destruction itself, which——­