“He’s more than that. Some day you will see; unless... unless....” “Well, unless what?” “Oh, nothing, only a man like that can’t expect to escape being spoilt. A certain type of woman will inevitably mark him down for her prey, and ruin all his freshness.” “Then you had better take him under your wing,” Hal laughed. “It would be a pity for such a paragon to be lost to society. Personally, stuffed blue-and-gold Apollos don’t interest me in the least. Come along to bed. I’m dead tired,” and she dragged Lorraine away. But instead of sleeping, the actress lay silently watching a star that shone in at her window, and thinking a little sadly about the man nature had chosen to endow so bountifully. In a few weeks she would be thirty-two and he was twenty-four. Supposing it had been twenty-two instead of thirty-two, and out of his splendour he had given his heart to her dark beauty, what a tale it might have been—what a fairy-tale of sweet, impossible things, with a golden-haired prince and a dark-eyed princess. She awoke from her day-dream with a touch of impatience, apostrophising herself for her folly. After all, what had a beautiful, successful woman at her prime to do with a youth of twenty-four, who played foolish games at a supper-table, and was only just beginning to know his world? Of course he would bore her intolerably at a second interview, and, closing her eyes resolutely, she drove his image from her mind. CHAPTER VII The second interview, however, by a mere coincidence, took place at Lorraine’s flat. She was walking leisurely down Sloane Street one afternoon, after visiting her milliner’s, when she ran into the young giant going in the opposite direction. “How so?...” she asked gaily, as is face lit up with a pleased smile, and he stopped in front of her. “Whither away at this hour? Are you chasing a brief?” “Much too brief,” he told her. “I had to carry some important papers to a certain well-known Cabinet Minister; and he did not even vouchsafe me a glance of his countenance. I was given an acknowledgment of them by the footman, as if I had been a messenger boy.” “Too bad. I think you deserve that another celebrity should give you a cup of tea, to redeem your opinion of the immortals. My flat is quite near, and I am now returning. Will you come?” “Oh, won’t I?” he said boyishly, and turned back. It was the fashionable hour in Sloane Street, when many well-dressed, well-known people are often seen walking, and when the road is full of private motors and carriages. Lorraine found herself moving still more slowly. She was accustomed to being gazed at herself, had in fact grown a little blasé of it, but the frank admiration bestowed on her giant amused and pleased her.