This frank avowal, uttered as it was with a delightful candour quite irresistible in its charm, brought a smile to Alma’s lips in spite of her own sombre thoughts. She slipped her arm round Isma’s waist, and led her towards one of the long windows which opened out on to the terrace under the pillared portico which ran the whole length of the front of the villa. “I quite agree with you,” she said. “If that tell-tale face of yours is no better masked than it is now, when you meet your Alexis I don’t think you will have long to wait for the provocation. Ah, well, I suppose--in fact, I am sure--that you take by far the wiser view, and I would give anything to be able to look upon Alan as you are ready to do on Alexis. “But no, it’s no use; do what I will I cannot think of him apart from that Syren who has held him in the bondage of her spells all these years. I know it is unreasonable, and yet he seems, even now that he has regained his freedom, to belong to her more than he ever did to me.” “That, my dear Alma,” replied Isma, half seriously and half in jest, “is as nearly absurd as anything that such a serious and cultivated person as yourself could say. If I could give you a share of my more trivial temperament you would just say that you are still so desperately jealous of Olga Romanoff that you cannot bring yourself to think of Alan as a possible lover until you feel quite sure that he hates her as intensely as you do. That may not be a very heroic way of putting it, but I think we shall find it pretty near the truth before you have known the new Alan very long.” Alma laughed more musically than mirthfully at this sally, but made no reply to it in words. There was, perhaps, more truth in the half-bantering, half-reproachful words than she would have cared to admit, even to her best-beloved and most confidential friend, and so she took a wise refuge in silence, from which Isma, in the gladness of her own heart, drew her own conclusions. It might have been that there were depths in Alma’s nature which not even their life-long friendship and their common sorrow had enabled her to fathom, but for the present she was quite satisfied that jealousy of Olga and anger at the advantage which Alma believed her to have taken of her power were the sole reasons that prevented her from regarding Alan as she had confessed herself ready and willing to regard Alexis. When they left the terrace the two girls had breakfast together in Alma’s own room in a privacy which the other members of the family tacitly respected, knowing as they did that the events of the day would bear a totally different significance for them to that which they would have for all the other inhabitants of the valley. By the time the sun began to show his disc above the ridges of the eastern mountains they were on their way to the city with Alma’s mother and father in one of the aerial boats that were used for transit about the interior of the valley.