She watched him, dreading what his answer might be.  There was silence for a moment, then he answered:  “Fleming is going to South Africa, not myself.  I stay here to do Wallstein’s work.  I was going, but Wallstein was taken ill suddenly.  So I stay—­I stay.”

She sank down in her chair, going a little pale from excitement.  The whiteness of her skin gave a delicate beauty to the faint rose of her cheeks—­that rose-pink which never was to fade entirely from her face while life was left to her.

“If it had been necessary, when would you have gone?” she asked.

“At once.  Fleming goes to-morrow,” he added.

She looked slowly up at him.  “Wallstein is a new name for a special Providence,” she murmured, and the colour came back to her face.  “We need you here.  We—­”

Suddenly a thought flashed into his mind and suffused his face.  He was conscious of that perfume which clung to whatever she touched.  It stole to his senses and intoxicated them.  He looked at her with enamoured eyes.  He had the heart of a boy, the impulsiveness of a nature which had been unschooled in women’s ways.  Weaknesses in other directions had taught him much, but experiences with her sex had been few.  The designs of other women had been patent to him, and he had been invincible to all attack; but here was a girl who, with her friendly little fortune and her beauty, could marry with no difficulty; who, he had heard, could pick and choose, and had so far rejected all comers; and who, if she had shown preference at all, had shown it for a poor man like Ian Stafford.  She had courage and simplicity and a downright mind; that was clear.  And she was capable.  She had a love for big things, for the things that mattered.  Every word she had ever said to him had understanding, not of the world alone, and of life, but of himself, Rudyard Byng.  She grasped exactly what he would say, and made him say things he would never have thought of saying to any one else.  She drew him out, made the most of him, made him think.  Other women only tried to make him feel.  If he had had a girl like this beside him during the last ten years, how many wasted hours would have been saved, how many bottles of champagne would not have been opened, how many wild nights would have been spent differently!

Too good, too fine for him—­yes, a hundred times, but he would try to make it up to her, if such a girl as this could endure him.  He was not handsome, he was not clever, so he said to himself, but he had a little power.  That he had to some degree rough power, of course, but power; and she loved power, force.  Had she not said so, shown it, but a moment before?  Was it possible that she was really interested in him, perhaps because he was different from the average Englishman and not of a general pattern?  She was a woman of brains, of great individuality, and his own individuality might influence her.  It was too good to be true; but there had ever been something of the gambler in him, and he had always plunged.  If he ever had a conviction he acted on it instantly, staked everything, when that conviction got into his inner being.  It was not, perhaps, a good way, and it had failed often enough; but it was his way, and he had done according to the light and the impulse that were in him.  He had no diplomacy, he had only purpose.