Discomfited, utterly worsted, Gwendolen trailed slow steps down the lighted vista. She longed for her father, but now he and Prince Hagané had begun to talk. A vacant window, half-hidden in trailing vines, allured her. She hurried to it, threw aside the curtain, and looked out into the deepening twilight. All of this fair March day had been blue and windless. The night was a bowl of liquid sapphire, a deep aerial sea into which the house had been lowered, like a great illuminated bell. So tangible, so intense, was the outer blueness that it seemed to Gwendolen, should she lift the sash an inch, a gentian tide must gurgle in through the fissure, steal along the wall to the shadowy floor, and silently fill the long rooms with a purple flood. That moment brought to the girl her first tinge of worldly bitterness. Heretofore, with the one exception of her quarrel, things had seemed naturally to come right just because she wished it. Even in dreams, things always came right for her. Now, by some shabby turn of fortune, the reverse was true; failure marked every effort. Being young, healthy, and totally unacquainted with real sorrow, it was inevitable that she should luxuriate in an imaginary despair. She stared into the night, envying its cool blue depths of silence and oblivion. She raised long lashes to the stars, gleaming faintly now like small phosphorescent mushrooms springing on a damp blue field, and wondered, sighing, whether on those distant planets lived any girl so miserable as she. "Miss Todd," murmured a low voice. She wheeled back to the lighted room with a gesture so sudden that two large tears splashed upon her cheeks. Dodge stood beside her half-abashed, altogether eager, deeply flushed by the late battle with his pride. Gwendolen's heart gave a bound toward him, then sank down whimpering. The girl, too, felt an overwhelming need for tears. One kind word more from Dodge, one faint concession on her part, and she must surrender utterly, bend down with her face hidden, and sob out her anxieties and her relief. Oh, if they were but alone, and she could "make up" as she longed to do! But now, because all eyes might turn to them, because she had not the self-control to explain, his tenderness must be met by scorn, in self-protection she must lash herself to stoicism by blows rained on him. She drew herself upright. He could not see how feverishly one primrose-colored hand clutched the window-frame. "You have--mis-taken your--corner, Mr. Dodge," she jerked out in a voice that needed to balance every word, like an acrobat on a wire. "Miss Niestra is, I think, in another part of the room." "I have, as you say, mistaken the corner. I shall not offend again," said Dodge.