Her red lips smiled an irresistible challenge at him, and the next instant his arm was round her waist, and he said: "After all, I don't think that contract was properly signed, sealed, and delivered; at least, the seal was in the wrong place, and the delivery was not quite complete." "Now I call that real mean, Viscount," she said, a moment afterwards. "I only gave you an option on the territory, and you're starting to occupy it right away." "Well, then," he said, taking her hand again, "suppose, instead of the territory, we call it a reserve. How will that do?" "Not quite," she said, drawing back a bit. "To some extent I've been taken by assault, but I've not surrendered at discretion yet. That sounds a bit mixed, I know--but it's pretty near the truth." "And at that," he said, gravely smiling, "I am quite content to leave it." And so, with the magical touch of her lips still thrilling through his blood, he left her, more than ever determined to fulfil to the utmost the tremendous destiny which chance had cast in his way. To him there could have been no more delightfully satisfactory ending to his mission. In blood he was himself half-American, and in him the old-world aristocrat was strangely blended with the keen, far-seeing, quick-witted, hard-headed, and perhaps, in one sense, hard-hearted man of business. It was to this side of his nature that the physical charms, the keen wit, and sprightly spirit of Miss Chrysie had first appealed; but later on the aristocrat in him had recognised that she too was a patrician of the New World, whose ancestry stretched back into the history of the old, and so gradually interest and admiration had grown into a love which completely satisfied all his instincts. The very way in which she had received his proposal had increased both his love and his respect. If she had surrendered at discretion there might have remained the possibility of a suspicion that, after all, she had been tempted to take hold of a magnificent opportunity, not only for placing herself in the front rank of European society, but also of wielding through her husband a power such as no woman had ever exercised before. But she had given him frankly to understand that these things were as nothing in her eyes, great and splendid as they were, without that certainty of mutual love which could alone induce her to give herself, body and soul, into the hands of any man, however powerful or nobly born; for Chrysie Vandel was a woman in the best sense of that much-meaning word, and she knew that for her there was no choice, save between the complete independence of thought and action which she had so far enjoyed, and an equally complete surrender to the man to whom she could render, whole-hearted and unreserved, the sweet service of love. After dinner that night he had an equally satisfactory interview with the president, who, when he had heard his story, just got up from his chair and said: