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met for a long time, and I can’t think why you should be so superior about him.”

Archie was fond of Pamela, but really, if she was going to take that sort of attitude—! Why should she be the only person in London who did not want to meet Tony St. Croix? She was absurdly prejudiced.

Pamela was fond of Archie too, and his last accusation had struck home. She softened.

“I’m not superior really, Archie, and I daresay he is a most interesting man. You may introduce him to-morrow night, if you like.”

Archie departed, somewhat mollified, and Pamela had no thoughts to spare for Tony until the next evening, when Archie presented him soon after her entrance into the ball-room. She looked at him. He was nice and tall, certainly, and his grey eyes were beautiful, but he stared too hard. . . . Her own dropped for a moment, and she was furious with herself, and therefore blushed, and was angrier still. But he had stopped staring. . . . Yes, she would let him have a dance. She would not allow him to make her feel young and nervous.

Tony did not mean to stare, but she was worth looking at, and he was trying to trace the child of the Orient boat in this radiant fairy princess. Allowing for the difference between white linen and white ninon with Brussels lace, she was easy enough to recognise. The flowing hair had darkened to brown, and it was done à la grecque, but the eyes were as blue and as wide as ever, and the little mouth was as obstinately young. And—he had never seen that neck before, and those shoulders. Yes, she was very lovely, and she had not changed; but all the same he did not feel that she was a real girl. “Distinctly flesh and blood,” he thought, “and yet she looks as if she might vanish at any moment. As if she were the vision of a real woman who exists somewhere else in the world.”