manner soothed her.  She was tremendously proud of Hayden.  She was glad he cared for her.  This seemed to her an excellent foundation for their marriage.  They would please and interest each other; neither would be bored!  And when, leaning across the table one day at lunch, he looked at her with unwonted fire in his quiet eyes, and said in a low voice:  “Just as soon as this business is finished, as soon as we’ve cleaned up the mess, I’m going to claim you, Anne.  It’s all I can do to wait!” Anne met his eyes, smiled slightly, and nodded.  A faint flush rose to her cheek, and a deeper one rose to his.  For a moment he touched her hand.

“You understand you are promised to me,” he said.  “If I dared show you what I really feel, Anne—­” and he glanced around the crowded dining-room, and smiled.

She smiled in return, tranquilly.  She was not stirred.  His touch had no power to thrill her.  She was comfortably content that things should be as they were, that was all.  Yet her very lack of emotion added to her charm for him.  He disliked emotional women.  Excess of affection would have bored him.  It smacked of crudeness, and he had an epicurean distaste for crudeness.

Busy as he was, he found time to select the ring he wished her to wear.  He was fastidious and hyper-critical to a degree, and he wished her ring to suit her, to be flawless.  It was really a work of art, and Anne Champneys wondered at her own coolness when she received the exquisite jewel.  She understood his feeling, she appreciated the beauty of the gem, yet it left her unmoved.  It gratified her woman’s vanity; it did not stir her to one heart-throb.  She accepted it, not indifferently, but placidly.  After a while she would accept a plain gold ring from him just as placidly.  This was her fate.  She did not quarrel with it.

Marcia watched her pleasedly.  She loved Anne Champneys, she admired Hayden exceedingly, and that they should marry each other seemed natural and inevitable.  Hayden was just the man she would have chosen for Anne.  Even the fact that Jason wasn’t altogether happy about it couldn’t dampen Marcia’s delight in the affair.  Jason would come around, in time.  He was too fond of Anne not to.

“Well, you’re free,” he had told Anne, the day that the Champneys marriage was declared null and void, and both parties had received the right to remarry, as a matter of course.  “You are free.  I’m sure I hope you won’t regret it!”

“Why should I regret it?” wondered Anne, good-humoredly.  But the big man shook his head, remembering Chadwick Champneys.