noise of a Babel of tongues and the glitter of a thousand lights upon his left hand; upon his right, the stars burning bright in a cool gloom of deepest purple, and far below the riding-lamps of the yachts tossing on the water like yellow flowers in a garden; whilst next to him, midway between the fragrant darkness and the hard glitter, revealing, as she always did, a kinship with each of them, sat Stella Croyle.

"I should have separated them," Hardiman reflected uneasily as he raised and drank his cocktail. "But how the deuce could I without making everybody stare? This party wasn't got up to separate people. All the same——"

The hushed wonder of a summer night. The gaiety of a bright thronged restaurant! In either setting Stella Croyle was a formidable antagonist. But combine the settings and she took to herself, at once by nature, the seduction of both!

"Poor devil, he won't have a dog's chance!" the baronet concluded; and he watched approvingly what appeared to him to be Luttrell's endeavour to avoid joining battle on this unfavourable field. He could only trust feebly in that and in the strength of the "something else," the secret reason he was never to know.

It was about half-way through dinner when Stella Croyle, who had directed many a furtive, anxious glance to the averted face of her companion, attacked directly.

"What is the matter with you to-night?" she asked, interrupting him in the midst of a rattle of futilities. "Why should you recite to me from the guide-book about the University of Upsala?"

"It appears to be most interesting, and quaint," replied Luttrell hastily.

"Then we might hire a motor-car and run out there to luncheon. To-morrow! Just you and I."

"No." Harry Luttrell exclaimed suddenly and Stella Croyle drew back. Her face clouded. She had won the first round, but victory brought her no ease. She knew now from the explosion of his "No" and the swift alarm upon his face that something threatened her.

"You must tell me what has happened," she cried. "You must! Oh, you turn away from me!"

From the dark steep garden at their feet rose a clamour of cheers—to Luttrell an intervention of Providence.

"Listen," he said.

Here and there a man or a woman rose at the dinner tables and looked down. Upwards along a glimmering riband of path, a group of students bore one of their number shoulder-high. Luttrell leaned over the balustrade. The group below halted; speeches were made; cheers broke out anew.

"It is the Swedish javelin-thrower. He won the championship of the world this afternoon."

"Did he?" asked Stella Croyle in a soft voice at his side. "Does he throw javelins as well as you? You wound me every time."

Luttrell raised his head. It was not fear of defeat which had kept his looks averted from Stella's dark and starry eyes. No thought of lists set and a contest to be fought out had even entered his head. But he did fear to see those eyes glisten with tears—for she so seldom shed them! And even more than the evidence of her pain he feared the dreadful submission with which women in the end receive the stroke of fortune. He had to meet her gaze now, however.

"I put off telling you," he began lamely.

"So that this evening of mine with you might not be spoilt," she returned. "But, my dear, my evening was already spoilt before the launch left the yacht gangway. I am not so blind."

Stella Croyle was at this date twenty-six years old; and it was difficult to picture her any older. Partly because of her vivid colouring and because she was abrim with life; partly because in her straightness of limb and the clear treble of her voice, she was boyish. "What a pretty boy she would make!" was the first thought until you noticed the slim delicacy of her hands and feet, the burnish of gold on the dark wealth of her hair, the fine chiselling of brow and nose and chin. Then it was seen that she was all woman. She was tall and yet never looked tall. It seemed that you could pick her up with a finger, but try and she warned you of the weakness of your arm. She was a baffling person. She ran and walked with the joyous insolence of eighteen, yet at any moment some veil might be rolled up in her eyes and face to show you for one tragic instant a Lady of Sorrows.

She leaned towards Luttrell, and as Hardiman had foreseen the perfume of her hair stormed his senses.

"Tell me!" she breathed, and Luttrell, with his arguments and reasons cut and dried and conned over pat for delivery, began nevertheless to babble. There were the Olympic Games. She herself must have seen how they were fatal to their own purpose. Troubles were coming—battles behind the troubles. All soldiers knew! They knew this too—the phrase of a young Lieutenant-Colonel lecturing at the Staff College.

"Battles are not won either by sheer force or pure right, but by the one or the other of those two Powers which has Discipline as its Chief of Staff."

He was implying neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would know surely enough when those words were rising to his lips which it was necessary that she should mark and understand. Meanwhile her perplexities and fears grew.

"Of course it can't be that," she assured herself again and again, but with a dreadful catch at her heart. "Oh no, it can't be that."

"That," was the separation which some day or another—after a long and wondrous period—both were agreed, must come. But, consoling herself with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her. Now it suddenly dismayed her, a terror close at hand. Here on this crowded balcony joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle invitations of a summer night above the water! Oh no, it was not possible!

Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and listened now with all her soul. More than once during dinner she had seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction. He drew from it two papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other Hardiman's reply. He handed her the first of the two.

"This reached me this morning."

Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth. But the letters would not be still.

"Oh, what does it mean?" she cried.

"It offers me service abroad."

Stella's face flushed and turned white. She bent her head over the cablegram.

"At Cairo," she said, with a little gasp of relief. After all Cairo was not so far. A week, and one was at Cairo.

"Further south, in the Sudan—Heaven knows where!"

"Too far then?" she suggested. "Too far."

"For you? Yes! Too far," Luttrell replied.

Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her eyes.

"But you are not going! You can't go!"

Luttrell handed to her the second paper.

"You never wrote this," she said very quickly.

"Yet it is what I would have written."

Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman. She had recognised his handwriting. Hardiman was in Luttrell's cabin while the rest of the party waited on the deck and the launch throbbed at the gangway. If a woman's glance had power, he would have been stricken that instant. But she wasted no more than a glance upon the worldly-wiseman at the head of their table. She turned again to the first telegram.

"This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?"

"Yes."

"To a cable of yours?"

"Sent three days ago."

The answers she received were clear, unhesitating. It was a voice from a rock speaking! So utterly mistaken was she; and so