and I must make the most of them. At least I should have a few minutes alone with Anne Pendennis, [Pg 2]on our way to the dinner at the Hotel Cecil,—the Savage Club “ladies” dinner, where she and my cousin Mary would be guests of Jim Cayley, Mary’s husband.

[Pg 2]

Anne had promised to let me escort her,—the Cayley’s brougham was a small one, in which three were emphatically a crowd,—and the drive from Chelsea to the Strand, in a hansom, would provide me with the opportunity I had been wanting for days past, of putting my fate to the test, and asking her to be my wife.

I had thought to find that opportunity to-day, at the river picnic Mary had arranged; but all my attempts to secure even a few minutes alone with Anne had failed; though whether she evaded me by accident or design I could not determine, any more than I could tell if she loved me. Sometimes, when she was kind, my hopes rose high, to fall below zero next minute.

“Steer clear of her, my boy,” Jim Cayley had said to me weeks ago, when Anne first came to stay with Mary. “She’s as capricious as she’s imperious, and a coquette to her finger-tips. A girl with hair and eyes like that couldn’t be anything else.”

I resented the words hotly at the time, and he retracted them, with a promptitude and good humor that disarmed me. Jim was a man with whom it was impossible to quarrel. Still, I guessed he had not changed his opinion of his wife’s guest, though he appeared on excellent terms with her.

As for Mary, she was different. She loved Anne,—they had been fast friends ever since they were school-girls together at Neuilly,—and if she did not fully understand her, at least she believed that her coquetry, [Pg 3]her capriciousness, were merely superficial, like the hard, glittering quartz that enshrines and protects the pure gold,—and has to be shattered before the gold can be won.

[Pg 3]

Mary, I knew, wished me well, though she was far too wise a little woman to attempt any interference.

Yes, I would end my suspense to-night, I decided, as I wrestled with a refractory tie.

Ting ... ting ... tr-r-r-ing! Two short rings and a long one. Not the telephone this time, but the electric bell at the outer door of my bachelor flat.

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