The old touch of romance and imagination which had been the governing forces of her grandfather’s life, the passion of an idea, however essentially false and meretricious and perilous to all that was worth while keeping in life, set her pulses beating now.  As a child her pulses used to beat so when she had planned with her good-for-nothing brother some small escapade looming immense in the horizon of her enjoyment.  She had ever distorted or inflamed the facts of life by an overheated fancy, by the spirit of romance, by a gift—­or curse—­of imagination, which had given her also dark visions of a miserable end, of a clouded and piteous close to her brief journey.  “I am doomed—­doomed,” had been her agonized cry that day before Ian Stafford went away three years ago, and the echo of that cry was often in her heart, waking and sleeping.  It had come upon her the night when Rudyard reeled, intoxicated, up the staircase.  She had the penalties of her temperament shadowing her footsteps always, dimming the radiance which broke forth for long periods, and made her so rare and wonderful a figure in her world.  She was so young, and so exquisite, that Fate seemed harsh and cruel in darkening her vision, making pitfalls for her feet.

Could she help him?  Had her moment come when she could force him to smother his scorn and wait at her door for bounty?  She would make the effort to know.

“But, yes, I am very busy,” she repeated.  “I have little interest in Moravia—­which is fortunate; for I could not find the time to study it.”

“If you had interest in Moravia, you would find the time with little difficulty,” he answered, lightly, yet thinking ironically that he himself had given much time and study to Moravia, and so far had not got much return out of it.  Moravia was the crux of his diplomacy.  Everything depended on it; but Landrassy, the Slavonian ambassador, had checkmated him at every move towards the final victory.

“It is not a study I would undertake con amore,” she said, smiling down at Jigger, who watched her with sharp yet docile eyes.  Then, suddenly turning towards him again, she said: 

“But you are interested in Moravia—­do you find it worth the time?”

“Did Count Landrassy tell you that?” he asked.

“And also the ambassador for Moravia; but only in the vaguest and least consequential way,” she replied.

She regarded him steadfastly.  “It is only just now—­is it a kind of telepathy’—­that I seem to get a message from what we used to call the power-house, that you are deeply interested in Moravia and Slavonia.  Little things which have been said seem to have new meaning now, and I feel”—­she smiled significantly—­“that I am standing on the brink of some great happening, and only a big secret, like a cloud, prevents me from seeing it, realizing it.  Is it so?” she added, in a low voice.