For a day or two Ordham could hardly believe in his good fortune, so suddenly had it descended upon him. When separated from Mabel he moved as in a dream, looking preternaturally serious lest he wear a fatuous grin. But this phase passed and he settled down to the business of being supremely happy, or as happy as possible while happiness was still incomplete. He thanked the American fates for the business complications that called Mrs. Cutting to New York and hastened the wedding, which was to take place early in October. Lady Bridgminster had written two frigid letters of congratulation, which Ordham and Mabel smilingly compared; but, being in Paris, graciously offered to confer with the great milliner who had the honour of dressing the young beauty, and spare her and her mother the miseries of crossing the Channel and of French hotels.

Ordham had never felt so young. Having cared little for girls and greatly for women of the world, he had been, and in spite of his precocity and cleverness, under an unconscious strain for several years past. He had always been “playing up,” as Hélène Wass once expressed it, when she may have felt—who knows?—a moment’s pity for him. Now, he had the sensation that Life, having long cheated him, was making sudden and wondrous restitution. It was that perfect flower of youth in Mabel that called to him as potently as her beauty and her high-bred grace and charm. He no longer cared what she read; she declared herself too happy to think of books, and he replied that they were writing a great romance of their own; time enough for other men’s unlifelike vapourings later. He did not see her often alone, and these sweet brief interviews gave a romantic intensity to their engagement which London might not have offered to a pair less severely chaperoned; although, to be sure, that exotic mansion, with its imported atmosphere of vanished Bourbons and their reckless nobles, exorcised the memory of grimy London, and was a poem in itself. Even in imagination he always saw her drifting about the lovely bright rooms with her eyes full of dreams. She treated him to a bewildering variety of moods, sometimes even chattering for a few moments quite like the old Mabel, only to melt insensibly into the dignified and stately girl he longed to exhibit to every court in Europe. Not only was he fully roused from the long lethargy of his youth and alive as he had fancied he might be at thirty, but the romantic cravings born during his extraordinary experience with Margarethe Styr were eager, hungry, almost satisfied. Only that wondrous period prosaically known as the honeymoon could perfect this poem of the prince and princess of fairy lore.

It never occurred to him to wonder if he could have loved Mabel Cutting had she been a poor girl and he forced to give up his diplomatic ambitions and supp............