And then further visions came to him, and he walked very fast; and presently he found himself opposite his lady’s house.

An impulse just to see her window overcame him, and he crossed the road and went out of the gate.  And there on the pavement he saw Mimo, also with face turned, gazing up.

And in a flash he thought he recognized that this was the man he had seen that day in Whitehall, when he was in his motor car, going very fast.

A mad rage of jealousy and suspicion rushed through him.  Every devil whispered, “Here is a plot.  You know nothing of the woman whom to-morrow you are blindly going to make your wife.  Who is this man?  What is his connection with her?  A lover’s—­of course.  No one but a lover would gaze up at a window on a moonlight night.”

And it was at this moment that Zara opened the window and, for a second, both men saw her slender, rounded figure standing out sharply against the ground of the room.  Then she turned, and put out the light.

A murderous passion of rage filled Lord Tancred’s heart.

He looked at Mimo and saw that the man’s lips were muttering a prayer, and that he had drawn a little silver crucifix from his coat pocket, and, also, that he was unconscious of any surroundings, for his face was rapt; and he stepped close to him and heard him murmur, in his well-pronounced English,

“Mary, Mother of God, pray for her, and bring her happiness!”

And his common sense reassured him somewhat.  If the man were a lover, he could not pray so, on this, the night before her wedding to another.  It was not in human, male nature, he felt, to do such an unselfish thing as that.

Then Mimo raised his soft felt hat in his rather dramatic way to the window, and walked up the street.

And Tristram, a prey to all sorts of conflicting emotions, went back into the Park.

* * * * *

It seemed to Francis Markrute that more than half the nobility of England had assembled in St. George’s, Hanover Square, next day, as, with the beautiful bride on his arm, he walked up the church.

She wore a gown of dead white velvet, and her face looked the same shade, under the shadow of a wonderful picture creation, of black velvet and feathers, in the way of a hat.

The only jewels she had on were the magnificent pearls which were her uncle’s gift.  There was no color about her except in her red burnished hair and her red, curved mouth.

And the whole company thrilled as she came up the aisle.  She looked like the Princess in a fairy tale—­but just come to life.

The organ stopped playing, and now, as in a dream she knew that she was kneeling beside Tristram and that the Bishop had joined their hands.

She repeated the vows mechanically, in a low, quiet voice.  All the sense of it that came to her brain was Tristram’s firm utterance, “I, Tristram Lorrimer Guiscard, take thee, Zara Elinka, to be my wedded wife.”