“No,” he was weighing mentally Porter’s attitude in the matter, “no one knew but Bigelow.”

“And he showed this to Mary?” They looked at each other, and laughed.  “Perhaps all’s fair in love,” Delilah murmured, at last, “but I wouldn’t have believed it of him.”

As she turned the picture toward the wall, Delilah decided, “Mary Ballard is worth a hundred of such women as this.”

“A woman like you is worth a hundred of them,” Colin stated deliberately.

Delilah flushed faintly.  Colin Quale was giving to her something which no other man had given.  And she liked it.

“Do you know what you are doing to me?” she said, as she sat down by the window.  “You are making me think that I am like the pictures you paint of me.”

“You are,” was the quiet response; “it’s just a matter of getting beneath the surface.”

There was a pause during which his fingers and eyes were busy with the shining samples—­then Delilah said:  “If Leila and her father go to Germany in May, I’m going to get Dad to go too.  I don’t suppose you’d care to join us?  You’ll want to get back to that girl in Amesbury or Newburyport, or whatever it is.”

“What girl?”

“The one you are going to marry.”

“There is no girl,” said Colin quietly, “in Amesbury or Newburyport; there never has been and there never will be.”  Coming close, he held against her cheek a sample of soft pale yellow.  “Leila Dick wears that a lot, but it’s not for you.”  He stood back and gazed at her meditatively.

“Colin,” she protested, “when you look at me that way, I feel like a wooden model.”

He smiled, “That’s what you have come to mean to me,” he said; “I don’t want to think of you as a woman.”

“Why not?” asked daring Delilah.

“Because it is, to say the least, disturbing.”

He occupied himself with his samples, shaking his head over them.

“None of these will do for the Secretary’s dinner.  You must have lace with many flounces caught up in the new fashion.  And I shall want your hair different.  Take it down.”

She was used to him now, and presently it fell about her in all its shining sable beauty; and as he separated the strands, it was like a thing alive under his hands.

He crowned her head with the braids in a sort of old-fashioned coronet.  And so arranged, the old fashion became a new fashion, and Delilah was like a queen.

“You see—­with the lace and your pearl ornaments.  There is nothing startling; but no one will be like you.”

And there was no one like her.  And because of the dress, which Colin had planned, and because of the way which he had taught her to do her hair, Delilah annexed to her train of admirers on the night of the Secretary’s dinner a distinguished titled gentleman, who was looking for a wife to grace his ancestral halls—­and who was impressed mightily by the fact that Delilah looked the part to perfection.