“She’s unstrung, poor little soul! And I don’t wonder. He came to tell her he was with Sir Gaspard when he died.” “What!” But after that one quick word he listened in silence, as Ismay told him all she saw fit to tell. “Why did she say you had been horrid about him?” he asked as she finished. “I don’t like him. Mother and I knew him in London. He is so ugly--oh! so ugly that I shiver when I look at him,” she returned lightly, yet he saw there was something behind her words. Even in a casual glance there had been something repulsive to him, too, in the face of the man who had passed him so quickly; not a nice person to have make love to you, as he guessed he had done to Miss Trelane. “Send for me if he comes again and you want to get rid of him,” he said as lightly as she. “I’d like to see him, too”--with sudden gravity. “It was strange, his being with Sir Gaspard at the end!” “He is a strange man, here to-day and gone to-morrow.” She spoke wearily. “But, of course, I really know very little about him. I was angry because his coming upset Cristiane so.” “Poor child.” But the tone in his voice was not that with which he would have spoken of the girl a fortnight before. “Time and letting alone are what she wants.” He glanced at the house as they neared it. “Do you think I am to be admitted?” he said. “Is your mother----” He did not finish. “My mother can afford to forgive you”--with unconscious bitterness. “And Cristiane would not like it if you did not come in.” “I don’t think it would disturb her,” he replied dryly. But he followed Ismay into the house. They sat by the hall fire, that glowed with a gentle warmth, and talked softly of nothings; with one consent of anything but the things that were past. As the girl’s green eyes met his, the spell of her beauty fell on him, till his love for Cristiane seemed a childish dream. Soft, white, sinuous, she sat in her great chair, and as she looked at him Miles Cylmer was powerlessly under her sway. “I will come to-morrow to bring back the horse,” he said softly, forgetting it was not his house. “May I?” And his blood was quick in him as she gave a little languid nod, so sweet and full of sorcery were her marvelous eyes. If he had dared he would have told her then and there that she was the only woman in the world for him. He knew now that pity and affection and an idle heart had made him fancy he cared for Cristiane. “You don’t hear what I’m saying, Mr. Cylmer!” Ismay’s little laugh roused him, and the man who had been loved by many women in his time looked up in boyish confusion. “I beg your pardon. What was it?” “It was like me, a thing of no importance,” she answered lazily. “But I wonder where your thoughts are”--and her hand, as if by accident, covered for one instant her scarlet lips. Was she a witch who had read his thoughts? For all he knew, she might be a very Circe, false as water, and yet he would have sworn that she was heavenly true.