Mentally she took to comparing this room with Adrian Fellowes’ sitting-room overlooking the Thames Embankment, where everything was in perfect taste and order, where all was modulated, harmonious, soigne and artistic.  Yet, somehow, the handsome chambers which hung over the muddy river with its wonderful lights and shades, its mists and radiance, its ghostly softness and greyness, lacked in something that roused imagination, that stirred her senses here—­the vital being in her.

It was power, force, experience, adventure.  They were all here.  She knew the signs:  the varied interests, the primary emotions, music, art, hunting, prospecting, fighting, gambling.  They were mixed with the solid achievement of talent and force in the business of life.  Here was a model of a new mining-drill, with a picture of the stamps working in the Work-and-Wonder mine, together with a model of the Kaffir compound at Kimberley, with the busy, teeming life behind the wire boundaries.

Thus near was Byng to the ways of a child, she thought, thus near to the everlasting intelligence and the busy soul of a constructive and creative Deity—­if there was a Deity.  Despite the frequent laughter on her tongue and in her eyes, she doubted bitterly at times that there was a Deity.  For how should happen the awful tragedies which encompassed men and peoples, if there was a Deity.  No benign Deity could allow His own created humanity to be crushed in bleeding masses, like the grapes trampled in the vats of a vineyard.  Whole cities swallowed up by earthquake; islands swept of their people by a tidal wave; a vast ship pierced by an iceberg and going down with its thousand souls; provinces spread with the vile elements of a plague which carpeted the land with dead; mines flooded by water or devastated by fire; the little new-born babe left without the rightful breast to feed it; the mother and her large family suddenly deprived of the breadwinner; old men who had lived like saints, giving their all to their own and to the world, driven to the degradation of the poorhouse in the end—­ah, if one did not smile, one would die of weeping, she thought.

Al’mah had smiled her way through the world; with a quick word of sympathy for any who were hurt by the blows of life or time; with an open hand for the poor and miserable,—­now that she could afford it—­and hiding her own troubles behind mirth and bonhommie; for her humour, as her voice, was deep and strong like that of a man.  It was sometimes too pronounced, however, Adrian Fellowes had said; and Adrian was an acute observer, who took great pride in her.  Was it not to Adrian she had looked first for approval the night of her triumph at Covent Garden—­why, that was only a few days ago, and it seemed a hundred days, so much had happened since.  It was Adrian’s handsome face which had told her then of the completeness of her triumph.

The half-caste valet entered again.  “Here come, madame,” he said with something very near a smile; for he liked this woman, and his dark, sensual soul would have approved of his master liking her.