through her underclothes. From this she cut enough to sew up into a tiny sachet.

Then she sat by the window and stitched, the young Welsh girl into whose busy, dimpled hands there had fallen this maybe tremendous Power. While the autumn sun glowed redly on the bodies of those pines without, while the border of far-off Biscay rollers tossed their cloud-like columns of white against the sky-line, she sat at her needle like a Fate with a face of a grave-eyed child, the mouth of a flower.

In a few minutes she had the square of satin ready for filling. She drew the packet from her bosom; opened it with a hundred precautions; poured into the sachet a little—a very little!—of the musky scented powder.

The packet itself she bestowed at the bottom of her work-basket, locking that carefully away. Yes; some of that was for her to wear again, but not now. Later on.

The curious fact persisted that she would wish to see first the effect of that Charm upon another wearer.

She had stitched up the sachet before she had answered her own question, "Whom shall I give it to first?"

CHAPTER III

THE LAUNCHING OF THE CHARM

"A field untilled, a web unwove,

A flower withheld from sun or bee,

An alien in the courts of Love——"

Kipling.

Kipling.

Accident decided it for her.

As she was running down the broad red and white steps at the front of the hotel, Olwen met, coming up, the woman whom Mrs. Cartwright had noticed at lunch for her hopeless well-off spinsterishness. The Spinster carried a guide book, a flowering-plant in a pot with paper round it, and a bound map.

She wore over those expensive tweeds of hers those furs which none but the young and radiant should venture to wear; grey squirrel. Her face was blank.

It lighted into a 

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