“Am I?” said she, in her tender tones.  “I would wish that you should always keep that good thought of me.  We shall soon go our different ways.  Josiah has decided to leave next week, and we are not likely to meet in England.”

“Yes, we are likely to meet—­I will arrange it,” he said.

There was nothing hesitating about Hector Bracondale—­his way with women had always been masterful—­and this quality, when mixed with a sudden bending to their desires, was peculiarly attractive.  To-night he was drifting—­drifting into a current which might carry him beyond his control.

It was now several years since he had been in love even slightly.  His position, his appearance, his personal charm, had all combined to spoil a nature capable of great things.  Life had always been too smooth.  His mother adored him.  He had an ample fortune.  Every marriageable girl in his world almost had been flung at his head.  Women of all classes with one consent had done their best to turn him into a coxcomb and a beast.  But he continued to be a man for all that, and went his own way; only as no one can remain stationary, the crust of selfishness and cynicism was perhaps thickening with years, and his soul was growing hidden still deeper beneath it all.  From the beginning something in Theodora had spoken to the best in him.  He was conscious of feelings of dissatisfaction with himself when he left her, of disgust with the days of unmeaning aims.

He had begun out of idle admiration; he had continued from inclination; but to-night it was plus fort que lui, and he knew he was in love.

The habit of indulging any emotion which gave him pleasure was still strong upon him; it was not yet he would begin to analyze where this passion might lead him—­might lead them both.

It was too deliciously sweet to sit there and whisper to her sophistries and reasonings, to take her sensitive fancy into new worlds, to play upon her feelings—­those feelings which he realized were as fine and as full of tone as the sounds which could be drawn from a Stradivarius violin.

It was a night of new worlds for them both, for if Theodora had never looked into any world at all, he also had never even imagined one which could be so quite divine as this—­this shared with her in the moonlight, with the magic of the Tzigane music and the soft spring night.

He had just sufficient mastery over himself left not to overstep the bounds of respectful and deep interest in her.  He did not speak a word of love.  There was no actual sentence which Theodora felt obliged to resent—­and yet through it all was the subtle insinuation that they were more than friends—­or would be more than friends.

And when it was all over, and Theodora’s pulses were calmer as she lay alone on her pillow, she had a sudden thrill of fear.  But she put it aside—­it was not her nature to think herself the object of passions.  “I would be a very silly woman to flatter myself so,” she said to herself, and then she went to sleep.