Watson?" "I have read some of his poems." "There is one I think very beautiful. I wonder if you know it. 'Pass, thou wild heart, wild heart of youth that still hast half a will to stay--'" She stopped and held her fan a little higher. "I don't know it," he said. "It always makes me feel that the man or woman who has never had the wild heart has never been truly and intensely human. But one must know when to stop, when to let the wild heart pass away." "But if the heart wants to remain?" "Then you must dominate it. Nothing is more pitiable, nothing is more disgusting, even, than wildness in old age. I have a horror of that. And I am certain that nothing else can affect youth so painfully. Old wildness--that must give youth nausea of the soul." She spoke with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiar and fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid through his veins. Suddenly he thought of the "old guard," and he knew that not one of the truly marvelous women who belonged to it could hold him or charm him as this white-haired woman, with the frankly old face, could and did. "After all," he thought, "it isn't the envelope that matters; it is the letter inside." Deeply he believed that just then. He was, indeed, under a sort of spell for the moment. Could the spell be lasting? He looked at Lady Sellingworth's eyes in the lamplight and firelight, and, despite a certain not forgotten moment connected with the Hyde Park Hotel, he believed that it could. And Lady Sellingworth looked at him and knew that it could not. About such a matter she had no illusions. And yet for years she had lived a life cloudy with illusions. What had led her out from those clouds? Braybrooke had hinted to Craven that possibly Seymour Portman knew the secret of Lady Sellingworth's abrupt desertion of the "old guard" and plunge into old age. But even he did not know it. For he loved her in a still, determined, undeviating way. And no woman would care to tell such a secret to a man who loved
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