“Owen, dear, I’m so happy, I don’t know what to do with myself.  I did enjoy my drive to the Bois.  I never was so happy and I don’t seem to be enjoying myself enough; I should like to sit up all night to think of it.”

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”

“Only I should feel tired in the morning....  Are you coming to my room?”

“Unless you want me not to.  Do you want me to come?”

“Do I look as if I didn’t?”

“Your eyes are shining like stars.  It is worth while taking trouble to make you happy.  You do enjoy it so....  We’ll go upstairs now.  We can’t talk here, Lady Duckle is coming back.  Leave your door ajar.”

“You don’t think she suspects?”

“It doesn’t matter what people suspect, the essential is that they shouldn’t know.  I’ve lots to tell you.  I’ve arranged everything with Lady Duckle.”

“I was just telling Miss Innes that in three years she’ll probably be singing at the Opera House.  In a year or a year and a half she’ll have learnt all that Savelli can teach her.  Isn’t that so?”

The question was discussed for a while, and then Lady Duckle mentioned that it was getting late.  It was an embarrassing moment when Owen stopped the lift and they bade her good-night.  She was on the third, they were on the second floor.  As Evelyn went down the passage, Owen stood to watch her sloping shoulders; they seemed to him like those of an old miniature.  When she turned the corner a blankness came over him; things seemed to recede and he was strangely alone with himself as he strolled into his room.  But standing before the glass, his heart was swollen with a great pride.  He remarked in his eyes the strange, enigmatic look which he admired in Titian and Vandyke, and he thought of himself as a principle—­as a force; he wondered if he were an evil influence, and lost himself in moody meditations concerning the mystery of the attractions he presented to women.  But suddenly he remembered that in a few minutes she would be in his arms, and he closed his eyes as if to delight more deeply in the joy that she presented to his imagination.  So intense was his desire that he could not believe that he was her lover, that he was going to her room, and that nothing could deprive him of this delight.  Why should such rare delight happen to him?  He did not know.  What matter, since it was happening?  She was his.  It was like holding the rarest jewel in the world in the hollow of his hand.

That she was at that moment preparing to receive him brought a little dizziness into his eyes, and compelled him to tear off his necktie.  Then, vaguely, like one in a dream, he began to undress, very slowly, for she had told him to wait a quarter of an hour before coming to her room.  He examined his thin waist as he tied himself in blue silk pyjamas, and he paused to admire his long, straight feet before slipping them into a pair of black velvet slippers.  He