Vane looked, and presently sighed a little. The face of the girl, as he found it in the glass, was the color of roses lying on a pool of clear water. It was one of those faces that one scarce knows whether to think finer in profile or in full view; the features were small, the hair glistened with a tint of that burnish the moon sometimes wears on summer nights, and the figure was a mere fillip to the imagination. A cluster of lilies of the valley lay upon her hair; they seemed like countless little cups pouring frost upon a copper glow. All about her radiated an ineffable gentleness, a tenderness; she made all the other folk about her seem garish and ugly and cruel. One wondered what she did in that gallery. "To the outer eye," said Vane, as he sighed, "she is certainly a flower, a thing of daintiness and delight. But--do you suppose I believe it, for a moment? I have no doubt she is merely one of those creatures whom God has made for the destruction of our dreams; her mind is probably as corrupt as her body seems fair. She is perhaps--" He stopped, for the face in the mirror had its eyes thrown suddenly in his direction. The eyes, in that reflex fashion, met, and something akin to a smile, oh, an ever so wistful, wonderful a smile, crept upon the lips and the eyes of the girl, while to the man there came only a sudden silence. "She is," continued Vane, in another voice altogether, and as if he were thinking of distant affairs, "very beautiful." The girl's eyes, meanwhile, had shifted towards Moncreith. He felt the radiance of them and looked, too, and the girl's beauty came upon him with a quick, personal force that was like pain. Vane's spoken approbation of her angered him; he hardly knew why; for the first time in his life he thought he could hate the man beside him. The girl turned her head a little, put up her hand and so hid her face from both young men, or there is no telling what sudden excuse the two might not have seized for open enmity. It sounds fantastic, perhaps, but there are more enmities sown in a single glance from a woman's eyes than a Machiavelli could build up by ever so devilish devices. Neither of the two, in this case, could have said just what they felt, or why. Moncreith thought, vaguely enough perhaps, that it was a sin for so fair a flower to waste even a look upon a fellow so shorn of faith as was Orson Vane. As for Vane-- Vane brought his hand upon the table so that the glasses rocked. "Oh," he exclaimed, "if one could only be sure! If one could see past the mask! What would I not give to believe in beauty when I see it, to trust to appearances! Oh, for the ability to put myself in the place of another, to know life from another plane than my own, to--" But here he was interrupted. CHAPTER III. "The secret you are seeking," said the man who had put his hand on Orson Vane's shoulder, "is mine."