Tom Leigh was afraid of her; and when they were asked for a week’s visit that autumn, in their box in Leicestershire, refused to go. May went. And if there was a man of whom she was not utterly unconscious, he surely was the one. Perhaps there was something about his way that she liked. For, with neither much speech, delay, nor artifice, our hero made his heart and soul up into a small packet and threw them into her deep eyes; and when she looked at him, he had them; and when she looked away, they were gone. And this he did perfectly frankly and directly, but without spoken words. The world saw it as clearly as did she, and liked him none the less for it. He was quite incapable of any effort to conceal it; old Terwilliger might have seen it had he been so minded. Possibly he did, and the knowledge lent an added value to his chattel in the old stockbroker’s mind. Mrs. Dehon herself treated May with perfect simplicity, but with an infinite gentleness, as the moon-goddess might have looked upon Endymion. This state of things got to be perfectly well known to the world. Such things always are well known to the world; nothing is more striking than the perfect openness with which our heart-histories are revealed in modern life, except perhaps the ease with which those most intimately concerned maintain a polite and unembarrassed appearance of utter ignorance upon the subject. All the world loves a lover, particularly a hopeless one; and it was quite the _mot d’ordre_ of society that year for people to ask Mrs. Dehon and the handsome American to their houses together. And Mrs. Dehon? Well, before the coming of spring she felt a great and trustful friendship for this incidental castaway upon the waters of her troubled life. May afterward remembered that she told him many things about herself; and she had spoken of herself to no one else before, her own father included. She even let him see a little of her heart. And it is an axiom that he who sees ever so little of a woman’s heart has but to take it. Seeing is possession. This is the wisdom of the fair Melusine, and other wise old mediæval myths. It is needless to say that May had absolutely forgotten the Countess de Valska; more completely than even she had forgotten the Siberian mausoleum of her Serge. If May thought of her once in that year, it was to dismiss her memory with a curse for his own folly, and a mental oath that no Trouvillian countess would part him, should his way ever be clear to Gladys Darcy. He would not recognize the hated name of Dehon, even in his thoughts.