For, once started, she and Graeme talked together most of the evening--breaking off reluctantly to drink various toasts to people in whom they had, at the moment, no remotest interest whatever, and recovering the thread of their conversation before they resumed their seats. Only one toast really interested Graeme, and that was "The Ladies--the Guests of the Evening"; and that he drank right heartily, with his eyes on Miss Brandt's sparkling face, and if it had been left to himself he would have converted it from plural to singular and drunk to her alone. Adam Black, excellent fellow, and gifted beyond most with wisdom and insight, and the condensed milk of human kindness, took upon himself the burden of Pixley, and engaged that eminent financier so deeply in talk concerning matters of import, that Miss Brandt and Graeme found themselves at liberty to enjoy one another to their hearts' content. They talked on many subjects--tentatively, and as sounding novel depths--in a way that occasioned one of them, at all events, very great surprise. Indeed, it seemed to him afterwards that, for a silent and observant man, he had been led into quite unwonted, but none the less very enjoyable, ways. He went home that night feeling very much as Columbus must have done when his New World swam before his eyes in misted glory. He too had sighted a new world. He had discovered Margaret Brandt. She had travelled widely over Europe, he learned, and was looking forward with eagerness to another tour in the near future. They discovered a common liking for many of the places she had visited. She was a wide and intelligent reader. To him it was a rare pleasure to meet one. "New places, and new books, and new people are always a joy to me," she said, in a glow of naive enthusiasm. And then she blushed slightly lest he should discover a personal application in the last-named, or even in the last two. But Graeme was thinking of her, and was formulating her character from the delicious little bits of self-revelation which slipped out every now and again. "Yes," he said, "new things are very enjoyable, and in these times there is no lack of them. The tendency, I should say, is towards superfluity. But new places----! There are surely not many left except the North Pole and the South. Everybody goes everywhere nowadays, and you tumble over friends in Damascus and find your tailor picnicking on the slopes of Lebanon." Now, as it chanced,--if you admit such a thing as chance in so tangled a coil as this complex world of ours,--Adam Black had just tucked Charles Pixley into a close little argumentative corner, and given him food for contemplation, and catching Graeme's last remark, he smiled across the table, and in a word of four letters dropped a seed into several lives which bore odd fruit and blossom. "Ever been to Sark, Graeme?" he asked. "Sark? No. Let me see----"