Wantele turned and looked at her. For the first time that evening he smiled broadly, and there came into his eyes the humorous light which generally dwelt there. "I suppose you know all about him," he said dryly. "I suppose you followed every step of the Expedition?" "Of course I did!" she exclaimed. "How father would have loved to meet General Lingard"--there came a touch of keen regret into her voice. "I expect you'll meet your hero very often before you've done with him, Mabel"--as he said the words he struck a match and lit a cigarette--"for he and Jane Oglander are going to be married." "General Lingard and Jane Oglander?" Mabel could not keep a measure of extreme surprise and excitement out of her voice, but she was, what her dead father's old soldier servant always described her as being, "a thorough little lady," and after hearing Wantele's quiet word of assent to her involuntary question, she refrained, without any seeming effort, from pursuing the subject. At last Wantele got up. "Well," he said. "Well, Mabel? This is a queer, 'unked' kind of world, isn't it?" She nodded her head, and without offering him her hand she unlatched the door. When she knew him to be well away, she came back and, laying her head on the table, burst into tears. She loved Jane Oglander--she rejoiced in Jane's good fortune--but the contrast was too great between Jane's fate and hers. But for Athena Maule, but for the spell Athena had cast over Bayworth Kaye, she, Mabel, would probably by now have been Bayworth's wife, on the way to India--India the land of her childish, of her girlish dreams. CHAPTER V "Nay, but the maddest gambler throws his heart." Richard Maule waited a while to see if his cousin would come to him, and then he went up to his bedroom. He soon dismissed his man-servant, and the book he had meant to read in the night--a book on the newly-revealed treasures of Cretan art--lay ready to his feeble hand on the table by the wide, low bed which was the only new piece of furniture placed there since the room had been the nursery of his happy childhood. But he felt unwontedly restless, and soon he began moving about the low-ceilinged, square room with dragging, heavy footsteps. When they had brought him back ill to death, as he had hoped, from Italy eight years before, it was here that he had insisted on being put; and there were good reasons for his choice, for the room communicated by easy shallow stairs with that part of the house where were the Greek Room, and the library which had been arranged for him by his grandfather as a delightful surprise on his seventeenth birthday.