the interest aroused in him by her slender, though delicately suggestive figure.  He felt the magnetic touch of her through the very flutter of her skirts—­felt the fervour of her soul, the warmth of her personality, and he found himself attracted by her as by the mystery of a bright and distant flame.  The intensity of life—­the radiant energy of intellect—­was in her look, in her voice, in her smile—­and he knew instinctively that she was capable of larger issues—­of higher heights and deeper depths—­than any woman he had ever known.  She puzzled him into a sympathy which quickened with each fresh instant of uncertainty, and it seemed to him, while she moved by his side, that the illusion of mystery was the one perennial charm a woman could possess—­a mystery which lay not only in the flame and shadow of her expression, but in the intenser irregularities of her profile, in the curved darkness of her eyebrows, in the fulness of her mouth, in the profound eloquence of her eyes, in the pale amber of her skin, which was like porcelain touched by a flame, in her gestures, in her walk, in her delicate bosom and slender swaying hips, in her voice, her hands, her words, and in the blackness of her abundant hair braided low upon the nape of her slender neck.  And this illusion—­stronger than the illusion of beauty because more subtle, more tantalisingly inexplicable, caught and held his attention with a vivid and irresistible appeal.

At his words she had turned toward him with an animated gesture, while her hand in its white glove slipped from the large muff she held.

“It would be a poor memory that could not hold three days,” she laughed.

“Three days?” He raised his eyebrows with a blithe interrogation which lent a peculiar charm to his expression.  “Why, I thought that I had known you forever!”

She shook her head in a merry protest, though she felt herself flush slowly under the gay deference in his eyes.

“Forever is a long day.  There are few people that it pays to know forever.”

“And how do you know that you are not one of them—­for me?” he asked.

“How do I know?” she took up the question in a voice which even in her lightest moments was not without a quality of impassioned earnestness.  “The one infallible way of knowing anything is to know it without really knowing how or why one knows.  My intuitions, you see, are my deeper wisdom.”

“And what do your intuitions have to say in regard to me?”

“Only,” she responded, smiling, “that it would be dangerous for us to attempt an acquaintance that should last forever.”

“Dangerous!” the word excited his imagination and he felt the sting of it in his blood.  “What harm do you think would come of it?”

“The harm that always comes of the association between opposites,” she answered quickly, and the laughter, he was prompt to notice, had died from her voice, “the harm of endless disagreements, of lost illusions.”