“Ah!” It was the man who was eager now.  He spoke impulsively.  “She will be happy then?  She loves him?”

Rosemary looked at him with her clear, unfaltering eyes.  “Oh, no,” she said.  “He isn’t that sort of man at all.  Besides, there is only one man in the world that she could care for in that way.  No, she doesn’t love him.  But she is doing the right thing, and she is going to be good.  You will not despise her any more?”

There was such anxious appeal in her eyes that he could not meet it.  He turned his own away.

There fell a silence between them, and through it the long, long roar of the sea rose up—­a mighty symphony of broken chords.

The man moved at last, looked down at the slight boyish figure beside him, hesitated, finally spoke.  “I still think that I should like to meet Rosa Mundi,” he said.

Her eyes smiled again.  “And you will not despise her now,” she said, her tone no longer a question.

“I think,” said Randal Courteney slowly, “that I shall never despise any one again.”

“Life is so difficult,” said Rosemary, with the air of one who knew.

* * * * *

They were strewing the Pier with roses for Rosa Mundi’s night.  There were garlands of roses, festoons of roses, bouquets of roses; roses overhead, roses under foot, everywhere roses.

Summer had returned triumphant to deck the favourite’s path.

Randal Courteney marked it all gravely, without contempt.  It was her hour.

No word from her had reached him, but that night he would meet her face to face.  Through days and nights of troubled thought, the resolve had grown within him.  To-night it should bear fruit.  He would not rest again until he had seen her.  For his peace of mind was gone.  She was about to throw herself away upon a man she did not love, and he felt that it was laid upon him to stop the sacrifice.  The burden of responsibility was his.  He had striven against this conviction, but it would not be denied.  From the days of young Eric Baron’s tragedy onward, this woman had made him as it were the star of her destiny.  To repudiate the fact was useless.  She had, in her ungoverned, impulsive fashion, made him surety for her soul.

The thought tormented him, but it held a strange attraction for him also.  If the story were true, and it was not in him to doubt it, it touched him in a way that was wholly unusual.  Popularity, adulation, had been his portion for years.  But this was different, this was personal—­a matter in which reputation, fame, had no part.  In a different sphere she also was a star, with a host of worshippers even greater than his own.  The humility of her amazed him.  She had, as it were, taken her fate between her hands and laid it as an offering at his feet.

And so, on Rosa Mundi’s night, he went to the great Pavilion, mingling with the crowd, determined when her triumph was over, to seek her out.  There would be a good many seekers, he doubted not; but he was convinced that she would not deny him an interview.