"It is so kind and good of you to be pleased, Marjorie. Nothing is more valuable to me than that. I am going to have half-an-hour with Donald Megbie now. I find that it's usual to tell the general public something at this stage. So I'm doing it through Megbie. He's safe, you know, and he understands one. But after that, will you let me take you in to have some supper? Do please let me! It would just make everything splendid, be the final joy, you know!" "I should be very churlish to refuse you anything to-night, William," she answered sadly, but with great pride for him in her voice. "Haven't you done almost everything for me? You've done what no other living man would have done. I shall be very glad and feel very proud if you will come back here for me after you have talked to Donald Megbie." Gouldesbrough went away with the journalist. In five minutes every one in Lord Malvin's house was saying that Marjorie Poole was engaged to Sir William Gouldesbrough once more. Marjorie watched the two men go away. Her heart was full of pride and pain. She rejoiced that all this had come to the chivalrous gentleman who had been her lover and plighted husband. She felt each incident of his growing triumph with intense sympathy and pleasure. He had been so good to her! From the very first he had been splendid. If only she could have loved him, how happy would her lot have been as mate and companion to such a man as this! She was not worldly, but she was of the world and knew it well. She realized most completely all the advantages, the subtle pleasures that would belong to the wife of this great man. The love of power and dominion, the sense of a high intellectual correspondence with the finest brain of the day, the incense of a lofty and chivalrous devotion--all these, yes, all these, would be for the girl Sir William loved and wedded. She half-wondered if such devotion as his had proved to be ought to go unrewarded. Was it _right_? Had any girl a real excuse for making a man like William Gouldesbrough unhappy? Guy Rathbone had faded utterly out of life. The greatest skill, the most active and prolonged inquiry had failed to throw the slightest light upon his disappearance. As a person, Guy had ceased to exist. He lived only as a memory in her heart. A dear memory, bitter-sweet--ah, sweet and bitter!--but no more a thing of flesh and blood. A phantom, a shadow now and for evermore! * * * * * Sir William and Donald Megbie sat in a small palm house talking earnestly together. A tiny fountain sent up its glittering whip of water from a marble pool on which water-lilies were floating, while tiny iridescent fish swum slowly round their roots. There was a silence and fragrance in the pleasant remote place, the perfume of exotic flowers, the grateful green of giant cacti which rested the eye.