“Don’t be so suspicious,” said Cecil. “I thought you prided yourself on your strength of mind?” “So be it, mademoiselle,” said the boy. “What is to happen will happen. We shall see.” In spite of these little rubs, however, the journeying life was very pleasant to Cecil, and she even looked forward with a certain degree of dread to the time when she must exchange the blue wrapper and high boots she wore in riding for the trailing dress and white sheet of the Palace. Everything out here was so entirely new, and she was separated from the troublesome personal questions and problems which had worried her lately at Baghdad. In these the chief factor was Charlie Egerton. She had never seen him since the day of the riot, when he had so suddenly and unwarrantably kissed her hand, but this was by her own wish, for she felt that she did not know how to meet him again. Anger at his presumption, and rage against herself for the display of weakness which had emboldened him to the act, combined to embitter her against him. And yet she could not keep him out of her thoughts. Her mind dwelt on the scene at the Residency so constantly that she became alarmed. What did all this mean? She must get away from Dr Egerton’s disturbing influence, and think the matter out calmly. With this in view, she had acquiesced in hurrying on her departure from Baghdad without seeing him, and she had since taken full advantage of her opportunity for thought. She had never exactly formulated to herself her views of an ideal lover, but she was vaguely conscious that, allowing for the difference of standpoint, her requirements were much on a level with those of the seventeenth-century poet who sang the praises of the “not impossible she.” And here, as she could not help perceiving, was the real lover--Charlie Egerton, frivolous, unstable, unsuccessful. These were the hard epithets she applied to him, while all the while admitting to herself that she could not help liking him, and that there was something noble and quixotic about his unfortunate efforts to keep other people up to their duty. But here again the softness of her own mood alarmed her, and she proceeded to examine into her feelings with all the systematic thoroughness of a practised student of mental science. After long cogitation, and much analysis of complex emotions into their elements, she came to the conclusion that she was not in love with Charlie. She even assured herself that she despised him a little, and this was obviously an insurmountable bar to love. But the chief drawback to the introspective method of studying mental phenomena is, as the text-books tell us, the danger of the mind’s forgetting its own states, or even misinterpreting them, owing to the distracting influence of personal fears and wishes. This Cecil forgot, while assuring herself that her clear duty now was to show Charlie plainly what her feelings were. It would be unkind to allow him to