“Ah, you don’t know me!” she whispered.  “I—­I am not what you think me.  I have disobeyed you, deceived you, cheated you!” Humbled to the earth, she made piteous, halting confession before her tyrant.  “I was at the masquerade tonight.  I waltzed—­and afterwards went into the maze—­in the dark—­with a stranger—­who made love to me.  I never—­meant you—­to know.”

Silence succeeded her words, and, as she waited for him to rise and spurn her, she wondered how she had ever brought herself to utter them.  But she would not have recalled them even then.  He moved at last, but not as she had anticipated.  He gathered the tumbled hair back from her face, and, bending over her, he spoke.  Even in her agony of apprehension she noted the curious huskiness of his voice.

“And yet you told me,” he said.  “Why?”

She could not answer him, nor could she raise her face.  He was not angry, she knew now; but yet she felt that she could not meet his eyes.

There was a short silence, then he spoke again, close to her ear: 

“You need not have told me, Naomi.”

The words amazed her.  With a great start of bewilderment she lifted her head and looked at him.  He put his hands upon her shoulders.  She thought she saw a smile hovering about his lips, but it was of a species she had never seen there before.

“Because,” he explained gently, “I knew.”

She stared at him in wonder, scarcely breathing, the tears all gone from her eyes.

“You—­knew!” she said slowly, at last.

“Yes, I knew,” he said.  He looked deep into her eyes for seconds, and then she felt him drawing her irresistibly to him.  She yielded herself as driftwood yields to a racing flood, no longer caring for the interpretation of the riddle, scarcely remembering its existence; heard him laugh above her head—­a brief, exultant laugh—­as he clasped her.  And then came his lips upon her own....

“You see, dear,” he said later, a quiver that was not all laughter in his voice, “it is not so remarkably wonderful, after all, that I should know all about it, when you come to consider that I was there—­there with you in the magic circle all the time.”

“You were there!” she echoed, turning in his arms.  “But how was it I never knew?  Why did I not see you?”

“Faith, sweetheart, I think you did!” said Sir Roland.  Then, at her quick cry of amazed understanding:  “I wanted to teach you a lesson, but, sure, I’m thinking it’s myself that learned one, after all.”  And, as she clung to him, still hardly believing:  “We have found our paradise together, my Lady Una,” he whispered softly.  “And, love, there is no way back.”

* * * * *

THE LOOKER-ON

I

“Oh, I’m going to be Lady Jane Grey,” said Charlie Cleveland, balancing himself on the deck-rail in front of his friends, Mrs. Langdale and Mollie Erle, with considerable agility.  “And, Mollie, I say, will you lend me a black silk skirt?  I saw you were wearing one last night.”