He patted her hand gently, while Dot blinked away her tears.

“Don’t let us talk about it any more now,” she besought him.  “Oh, Lucas—­I do want you to live, more—­more than anything.”

“That’s real kind of you,” he said.  “I’ll do my best, you may be sure.  I can hear Lady Carfax talking in the drawing-room.  Won’t you go and bring her out?”

He made no effort to rise when Anne came on to the terrace, but he gave her so vivid a smile of welcome that she scarcely noted the omission.  It was their first meeting since Nap’s departure, for Lucas had been confined to his bed for days.  But that smile of his banished any sense of embarrassment from her mind.  He was so candidly, so unaffectedly, pleased to see her.

She sat down in the riotous sunshine and gave herself up unreservedly to the pleasure of being with her friends.  They were all congenial to her.  Mrs. Errol, Dot, Lucas, but most especially Lucas, who occupied a unique position in her heart and in her thoughts.  He had always been so perfectly her friend in need.

As the long, sunny afternoon wore away, she found herself watching him and in silence marvelling.  How was it that this man in his utter, piteous weakness accomplished so much, ruled thus supreme?  Wherein lay that potent charm of his which neither devil nor brute could effectively resist?  Whence came it, this power of the soul, this deliberate and conscious mastery?

She watched Bertie waiting on him, hovering about him, ready to spring up at his lightest word to execute his scarcely-uttered wish.  Other men—­even great men—­did not command this personal homage, this complete, incessant devotion.  Undoubtedly there was something kingly about him; but wherein did it lie?  Not in the impotent, unwieldy figure, not in the pleasant, emotionless drawl, not even in the friendly quiet of his eyes, the kindly sympathy of his smile.  In none of these lay his power, and yet in all of them it was in some fashion apparent.  No great force of personality characterised him, and yet his monarchy was absolute.  No splendour of intellect, no keenness of wit, no smartness of repartee were his.  Only a shrewdness of understanding that was never cruel, a humour that had no edge.

And presently Anne remembered that his own mother had given her the key to the problem, and she doubted not that it solved the whole.  “It isn’t personal magnetism,” Mrs. Errol had said, “nor anything of that sort.  It’s just love.”

That was the magic to which even Nap, the fierce, the passionate, the treacherous, had been forced to bow.  In the midst of his weakness this man wielded an all-potent power—­a power before which they all instinctively did homage—­before which even devils humbled themselves—­because it was Divine.