to a vital question—­already put in a thousand ways and answered to his perfect satisfaction.  Indeed, there was between Jasmine and himself the equivalent of a betrothal.  He had asked her to marry him, and she had not said no; but she had bargained for time to “prepare”; that she should have another year in which to be gay in a gay world and, in her own words, “walk the primrose path of pleasure untrammelled and alone, save for my dear friend Mrs. Grundy.”

Since that moment he had been quite sure that all was well.  And now the year was nearly up, and she had not changed; had, indeed, grown more confiding and delicately dependent in manner towards him, though seeing him but seldom alone.

As Ian Stafford looked at her now, he kept saying to himself, “So exquisite and so clever, what will she not be at thirty!  So well poised, and yet so sweetly child-like dear dresden-china Jasmine.”

That was what she looked like—­a lovely thing of the time of Boucher in dresden china.

At last, as though conscious of what was going on in his mind, she slowly turned her drooping eyes towards him, and, over her shoulder, as he quickly leaned forward, she said in a low voice which the others could not hear: 

“I am too young, and not clever enough to understand all the music means—­is that what you are thinking?”

He shook his head in negation, and his dark-brown eyes commanded hers, but still deferentially, as he said:  “You know of what I was thinking.  You will be forever young, but yours was always—­will always be—­the wisdom of the wise.  I’d like to have been as clever at twenty-two.”

“How trying that you should know my age so exactly—­it darkens the future,” she rejoined with a soft little laugh; then, suddenly, a cloud passed over her face.  It weighed down her eyelids, and she gazed before her into space with a strange, perplexed, and timorous anxiety.  What did she see?  Nothing that was light and joyous, for her small sensuous lips drew closer, and the fan she held in her lap slipped from her fingers to the floor.

This aroused her, and Stafford, as he returned the fan to her, said into a face again alive to the present:  “You look as though you were trying to summon the sable spirits of a sombre future.”

Her fine pink-white shoulders lifted a little and, once more quite self-possessed, she rejoined, lightly, “I have a chameleon mind; it chimes with every mood and circumstance.”

Suddenly her eyes rested on Rudyard Byng, and something in the rough power of the head arrested her attention, and the thought flashed through her mind:  “How wonderful to have got so much at thirty-three!  Three millions at thirty-three—­and millions beget millions!”