more deferential and protective.  It was a manner to which every true woman responds, and Margaret was happy, more herself, and talked with a freedom and gayety, a spice of satire, and a note of reality that made her every moment more attractive to her companion.  In her, animation the charm of her unworn beauty blazed upon him with a direct personal appeal.  He hardly cared to conceal his frank admiration.  She, on her part, was thinking, what could Miss Eschelle mean by saying that she was afraid of him?

“Does the world seem any larger here, Miss Debree?” he asked, as they had lingeringly made the circuit of the room and passed out through the tropical conservatory to join the rest of the company.

“Yes—­away from people.”

“Then it is not numbers, I am glad to know, that make a world.”

She did not reply.  But when he encountered her, robed for departure, at the foot of the stairway, she gave him her hand in good-night, and their eyes met for a moment.

I wonder if that was the time?  Probably not.  I fancy that when the right day came she confessed that the moment was when she first saw him enter their box at the opera.

Henderson walked down the avenue slowly, hearing the echo of his own steps in the deserted street.  He was in no haste to reach home.  It was such a delightful evening-snowing a little, and cold, but so exhilarating.  He remembered just how she turned her head as she got into the carriage.  She had touched his arm lightly once in the gallery to call his attention to a picture.  Yes, the world was larger, larger, by one, and it would seem large—­her image came to him distinctly—­if she were the only one.

Henderson was under the spell of this evening when the next, in response to a note asking him to call for a moment on business, he was shown into the Eschelle drawing-room.  It was dimly lighted, but familiarity with the place enabled him without difficulty to find his way down the long suite, rather overcrowded with luxurious furniture, statuary, and pictures on easels, to the little library at the far end glowing in a rosy light.

There, ensconced in a big chair, a book in her hand, one pretty foot on the fender, sat Carmen, in a grayish, vaporous toilet, which took a warm hue from the color of the spreading lamp-shades.  On the carved table near was a litter of books and of nameless little articles, costly and coquettish, which assert femininity, even in a literary atmosphere.  Over the fireplace hung a picture of spring—­a budding girl, smiling and winning, in a semi-transparent raiment, advancing with swift steps to bring in the season of flowers and of love.  The hand that held the book rested upon the arm of the chair, a finger inserted in the place where she had been reading, her rounded white arm visible to the elbow, and Carmen was looking into the fire in the attitude of reflection upon a suggestive passage.

Women have so many forms of attraction, different women are attractive in so many different ways, moods are so changing, beauty is so undefinable, and has so many weapons.  And yet men are called inconstant!