earlier: and then Gerald, after having agreed with her that people certainly ought to be more careful about their personal belongings, went on with what was really in his mind.

“In any event, ma’am,” he hazarded, with the brief cough of diffidence, “it seems there have been tender passages between us before this morning—”

“I trusted you! I gave you all!” she said, reproachfully. “But you, disposer of supreme delights, and fair vase of my soul, you have forgotten even the way you used to take advantage of my confidence! For how can the modesty of a frail woman avail against the brute strength of a determined man!”

“No, Evelyn, not to-night—I beg your pardon, ma’am! My mind was astray. What I meant to say was that I really must request you to desist.” Then Gerald went on, tenderly: “To the contrary, my dear lady, our love stays unforgettable. I recall every instant of it, I bear in mind even that sonnet which I made for you on the evening of my first respectful declaration of undying affection.”

“Ah, yes, that lovely sonnet!” the Princess remarked, with the uneasiness manifested by every normal woman when a man begins to talk about poetry.

“—And to prove it, I will now recite that sonnet,” Gerald said.

And he did.

Yet his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the octave, Gerald paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent.

He caught up the lovely, always straying hands of the Princess Evasherah, of this impulsive and investigatory lady, who so troublingly resembled Evelyn Townsend, and Gerald pressed these hands to his trembling lips. This lovely girl, returned to him almost miraculously, it might seem, out of his well-nigh forgotten past, was not merely intent once more to trust him and to give him all. She trusted also, as Gerald felt with that keen penetration which is natural to divine beings, to delude and to wheedle him into some material loss. What the Princess desired to cajole him out of was, perhaps, not wholly clear. Nevertheless, he felt that, in some way or another way, Evasherah was attempting to deceive him. It might be that neither her explanation as to that skull nor even her so candid seeming adoration of his wisdom and his comeliness was entirely sincere. For women were like that: they did not 

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