He surveyed with absurd pleasure that minute black crescent on the pale rose of her countenance. If she had been good before she was adorable now: her confession had drawn her out of the transplendid cloud where he had elevated her down to his side; she was infinitely more desirable, more warmly and delightfully human. “I have been asking about you,” she told him later, with a slight frown; “the accounts are, well--various. I don't mind your--your friends of the stables, Anthony; they are, what Ellerton will never learn, the careless choice of a born aristocrat; I don't care a Tecla pearl whether you are 'a steady young man' or not. And one doesn't hear a whisper of meanness about you anywhere. But I have an exaggerated affection for things that are beautiful, I suppose it's a weakness, really, and ugly people or surroundings, harsh voices even, terrify me. The thought of cruelty makes me cold. And, since you will come into my thoughts, and smile your funny little smile at me out of walls and other impossible places, I should like to picture you, not in pool rooms, but on the hills that you know so well. I should like to think of your mind echoing with the rush of those streams, the hunting of those owls, you told me about, and not sounding with coarse and silly and brutal words and ideas.” “It echoes with you,” he replied, “and you are more beautiful than hills and streams.” For a moment she held his gaze full in the blue depths of her vision; then, with a troubled smile, evaded it. “I'm a patched jade,” she announced. Ranke, the servant informed them, was ready to meet the train. “You're going... Elbe's affair on the Wingohocking?” “Absolutely.” She stood illusive against the saffron blur of the candles, the sweeping hem of night. “I'll remember,” he blundered; “whatever you would wish... you have changed everything. The dinner was--I don't remember what it was,” he confessed; “but I remember an olive.” He left the automobile at the edge of Ellerton, and proceeded on foot, passing the dully-shinning bulk of the circus tent. He heard the brassy dissonance of the band within, the monotonous thud of horses' hoofs on the tanbark; a raucous voice rose at the entrance to the side-show dwelling unctuously on the monstrosities to be viewed within for the price of a dime, of a dime, a dime. He recalled the spent lioness in her painted cage, the haggard and sick hyena, the abject trot of the wolves to nowhere.--A sudden exhalation of hatred swept over him for the hideous inhumanity of circuses and men. Eliza had lifted him from the meaningless babble of trivial and hard voices into a high and immaculate region of shining space and quietude. He didn't want to come down again, he protested, to _this_. XV