How supremely attractive she was!  And to have to give her up to Henry; it was too frightfully cruel.  But he had absolutely no right to stand in either of their lights.  He had not even the right to undermine his friend’s influence by deed or look, since he had given him his word of honor that he would not do so.  What a blind fool he had been all those years ago to let passionate rage at Sabine’s daring to leave him make him write her that letter.  He would not have done it if he had not felt such an intolerable brute—­and glad to cut the whole thing by accepting Latimer Berkeley’s suggestion to join him for the China expedition at once.  The Berkeley letter coming that next morning was a stroke of fate.  If he had had a day to think about things, he would have followed his impulse after the anger died down, and gone after her to Mr. Parsons’ London address, but he had already wired to Latimer and his resentful blood was up.

He remembered how he had not allowed himself to think of her—­but had concentrated his whole mind upon his sport.  For it had been tremendous sport and had interested him deeply, that journey to Tibet.  And however strong feelings may be at moments—­absence and fresh interests dull them.  To banish her memory became a good deal easier as time went on, and even the idea to divorce her if she wished did not seem too hard.

But now he had seen her again—­and every spell she had cast over him on that June night was renewed ten-fold.  She was everything he could desire—­she was beautiful and sweet and witty, with a charm which only complete independence and indifference can ever give a woman in the eyes of such a man as he.  This he did not reason out—­thinking himself a very ordinary person—­in fact, never thinking of himself at all or what his temperament was affected by.  He did not realize either that the very fact of Sabine’s being now out of his reach made her appear the one and only thing he cared to possess.  He knew nothing except that he felt perfectly mad with fate—­mad with himself for making an unconditional promise to Henry, perfectly furious that he had been too stupid to connect the name of Howard at once with his wife.

And here he was sleeping in her castle—­not she sleeping in his!  And he was conforming to her lead—­not she following his.  And the only thing for a gentleman to do under the complicated circumstances was to speedily divorce her according to the Scottish law and let her marry his friend, Henry Fordyce—­give them his blessing and lend them Arranstoun for the honeymoon!

When he got thus far in his meditations, he simply stood in the middle of the room and cursed aloud.

Never in his whole life had bolts or bars or circumstances been allowed to keep him from his will.

And then it did come to his shrewd mind that these things were not circumstances, but were barriers forged by himself.

“If I had not been such an awful brute—­and the moment had not been—­as it was—­I might have gradually made her love me and kept her always for my own!” his thoughts ran.  “Well—­we were both too young then—­and now I must take the consequences and at least not be a swine to poor old Henry.”