was unsuited to sitting indoors, the Arnotts had had the grounds lighted, and engaged some musicians to play at intervals during the evening. Pamela, who possessed a very fine contralto voice, sang once towards the finish of the evening, standing on the brilliantly lighted stoep outside the drawing-room windows, a fair, radiant, girlish figure, singing with extraordinary passion that seductive song from Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila,” “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.”

Dare, a little apart from the rest, took up his position beside a tall bush of gardenias and listened with absorbed attention until the finish of the song, his keen eyes never leaving the singer’s face, lost in a wondering rapture of admiration for the singer as much as for the song.

“Ah! réponds à ma tendresse...”

The seductive words, the seductive tones, thrilled him. He was Samson listening to Delilah,—a Delilah sweet and charming and womanly, without the sting of poison in her passionate entreating.

When the song ended he still remained motionless, not joining in the applause which followed, heedless of everything about him, conscious only of one fair girlish face, of a pair of limpid eyes, blue as the African sky itself, and of the tender curve of sweet lips made for laughter. For five years he had been searching for this face, and he found it here—the centre jewel in another man’s crown of happiness.

“Her price is far above rubies; the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her; her children rise up and call her blessed...” Involuntarily the words came to his mind with a sense of their appropriateness. Where had he heard them? He did not know. But assuredly they were written for her.

He turned his head and glanced at the people near him. With the finish of the song they had started talking again, carrying on the conversations which the music had interrupted. No one seemed to have been impressed, as he had been, with the moving power of the seductive voice. Possibly they had heard it often before: he heard it for the first time, and felt profoundly stirred.

When he looked round again she had moved away, and formed one of a gay group on the stoep. He waited until she left this group, then, when he saw her alone for a moment, he seized his chance and joined her. Her guests had been pressing her to sing again, but she declined. For some reason Dare was glad she refused. He wanted no other song, perhaps with an altogether different sentiment, to sweep away the emotions which the first song had produced in his soul. He was oddly stirred and excited, moved out of his ordinary calm by a sensuous love song finely rendered by a woman who was an artist, and yet surprisingly natural.

He did not compliment her on her singing. It was the obvious thing to do; but Dare seldom did the obvious. If he could have thanked her in his own way for the pleasure she had given, that would have been an altogether different matter. But his way was not consistent with twentieth-century customs, nor was it practicable in the case of a married woman in the company of her husband and friends.

“I’ve been exploring your beautiful grounds, Mrs Arnott,” he said. “What a delightful place you have here.”

“Yes; isn’t it?” returned Pamela, with ingenuous pride in her home. “I’m so glad you like it. I love it.”

“I’m sure you must,” he replied.

“You must come and see the garden in the day time,” she added graciously. “From the lawn the view of the mountain is very fine,—if you admire the mountain. I never tire of watching it. It adapts itself to one’s mood. Or perhaps I should say its varying aspects affect one’s mood. I sit out there and study it for hours at a stretch.”

“I should like to do that,” he said.

“Well, you shall, if you care to. I like to share my mountain.”

“Do you ever visit Johannesburg?” he asked.

“I haven’t been there yet.”

“You ought to,” he said. “It is an interesting city. There are some nice homes there, too—and gardens.”

“You have a good garden, I suppose?” Pamela said. “You must have, because you appreciate them.”

“Ah! there are plenty of things which I appreciate that I haven’t got,” he replied. “I am a bachelor, and live at hotels—when I’m above ground,” he added with a smile. “A fairly unenviable existence, eh?”

“Why not change all that, and marry?” she suggested.

He regarded her contemplatively for a second, and then looked deliberately away.

“I don’t fancy I belong to the marrying sort,” he said.

“Oh, nonsense!” returned Pamela brightly. “Every one is the marrying sort when he meets the right person.”

“Yes! Then I imagine the right person hasn’t revealed herself.”

“You should go in search of her,” she said.

“I did once—five years ago.”

“Yes?” Pamela looked at him with a gleam of feminine interest in her deep eyes. “Five years ago you went in search of her... And then?...”

“She had run away,” he said, “and was married to some one else.”

“Oh!” Her voice had a disappointed ring. This that she was hearing was altogether the wrong kind of a finish to an interesting romance. “Then she wasn’t the right person after all.”

“She was for me,” he replied with quiet conviction. “But, you see, both sides have a voice in these matters.”

“But if she didn’t care for you, she couldn’t have been the right person,” she insisted. “Believe me, the right person is waiting somewhere.”

“In that case,” he said lightly, “when we meet I shall doubtless recognise her. I won’t give her the chance to run away a second time. A man who is dilatory in his love affairs deserves to spend his days underground and his nights in hotels. I’m not complaining.”

Suddenly she laughed.

“I don’t believe you are the least bit in earnest,” she observed. “You are one of these contradictory people who look serious, and are always laughing at life.”

He scrutinised the smiling face with added interest.

“I don’t as a rule take life seriously,” he returned,—“and a very good rule too. If I am not mistaken, Mrs Arnott, it is a rule you practise yourself.”

“I don’t know about that,” Pamela said in her bright, young voice. “I take each day as it comes, and make the most of it. That’s the best way, really.”

“For you, perhaps,” he answered. “But some of us would have a dull time if we had no to-morrow in contemplation. I have no quarrel with to-day, for instance; but there are days in my life I could cheerfully wipe off the calendar.”

“There used to be those kind of days in my life once,” she rejoined. She looked up at him, smiling, so radiant in her gladness that he was forced to smile in sympathy with it. “They make the present so much jollier,” she said.

“You enjoy by comparison,” he returned.

“I suppose that’s it—in a way; yes. When you have followed my advice you will do that too.”

“The same prescription doesn’t fit every case,” he ventured.

“It doesn’t cure every