When he had gone, she settled down to her correspondence. But for a long while she sat biting the end of her quill pen. “I wonder who she can be,” she said, musingly. Of course it was a woman. She passed in review all their common acquaintance; then shook her head with a smile. This disturbing element in Hugh’s life lay outside the circle. The image of Minna Hart never presented itself before her thoughts. For Irene had large ideas, and pictured the woman as one of commanding intelligence and brilliant personality. How else to account for the folly of so vigorous a manhood as Hugh’s? A noble man, a noble choice. Foolish--but sublimely so. She knew little of the ways of men, judged them according to her own ideals. For her life had been spent singularly apart from men. Her mother, a delicate woman, unable to bear the Indian climate, had brought her up in quiet seclusion. She had been a choice spirit, a weaver of dreams, one whose presence is felt like the moonlight through Gothic tracery, a writer of flower-like fairy tales for children, an ethereal being whom it was Irene’s impassioned mission to shelter from the rough winds. Her father, once a soldier with a V. C. in the Mutiny, afterwards a commissioner of a great Indian province, had appeared to her in brief spells of leave, invested with a halo of glory. On her mother’s death, she had gone out heartbroken to join him, but only to learn, on arrival at Bombay, that she was fatherless. And then, for the first time, men, Gerard and Hugh, had come into her life--and she saw them as gods walking. The years had mellowed into a strong, homogeneous character her inherited qualities--the mother’s delicate womanliness, the father’s daring and power of leadership--and busy contact with the world had developed the acuteness of her judgment; but the ideals of the girl survived, unprofaned by vulgar touch. The two men to whom she had given her love and friendship still remained as gods, above the baser passions and meaner follies of mankind. Suddenly a face flashed before her, as that, possibly, of the mysterious woman who was involved in Hugh’s life. She had never seen it in the flesh; only a photograph of it some years ago, in Hugh’s rooms, when she was lunching there with Gerard. She had taken a book from the shelves and the portrait had fallen out. It represented a woman, tall, resplendent, haughty, cruelly beautiful. The eyes, even in the photograph, glittered coldly and dangerously. Irene had uttered a little cry of surprise and admiration. Hugh had taken it from her hands. “A great beauty,” she had remarked. “Yes. _La Belle Dame sans merci_.” “Her eyes are cruel.” “They are ophidian. I don’t like you to look at them,” he had replied, throwing the photograph into a drawer. And then he had said, with a smile: “They belong to ‘old unhappy far-off things, and battles long ago.’”