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When he had seen her before, he had been utterly out of sympathy. He had scorned her charms, had felt an almost angry contempt for young Baron’s raptures. To him she had been a snake-woman, possessed of a fascination which, to him, was monstrous and wholly incomprehensible. She had worn a strange striped dress of green–tight-fitting, hideous he had deemed it. Her face had been painted. He had been too near the stage, and she had revolted him. Her dance had certainly been wonderful, sinuous, gliding, suggestive–a perfectly conceived scheme of evil. And she had thought to entrap him with it! The very memory was repulsive even yet.

But this–ah! this was different. This thing of light and air, this dancing sunbeam, this creature of the morning, exquisite in every detail, perfectly poised, swifter than thought, yet arresting at every turn, vivid as a meteor, yet beyond all scrutiny, all ocular power of comprehension, she set every nerve in him a-quiver. She seized upon his fancy and flung it to and fro, catching a million colours in her radiant flights. She made the hot blood throb in his temples. She beat upon the door of his heart. She called back his vanished youth, the passion unassuaged of his manhood. She appealed to him directly and personally. She made him realize that he was the one man who had taught–and could teach–her the meaning of life.

Then it was over. Like a glittering crystal shattered to fragments, his dream of ecstasy collapsed. The noise around him was as the roar of thundering breakers. But he sat mute in the midst of it, as one stunned.

Someone leaned over from behind and spoke to him. He was aware of a hand upon his shoulder.

“What do you think of her?” said Ellis Grant in his ear. “Superb, isn’t she? Come and see her before she appears again!”

As if compelled by some power outside himself, Courteney rose. He edged his way to the end of the row and joined the great man there. The whole house was a seething turmoil of sound.

Grant was chuckling to himself as one well pleased. In Courteney’s eyes he looked stouter, more prosperous, more keenly business-like, than when he had spoken with him a few nights previously. He took Courteney by the arm and led him through a door at the side.

“Let ’em yell ’emselves hoarse for a bit!” he said. “Do ’em good. Guess my ‘rose of the world’ isn’t going to be too cheap a commodity…. Which reminds me, sir. You’ve cost me a thousand English pounds by coming here to-night.”

“Indeed?” Courteney spoke stiffly. He felt stiff, physically stiff, as one forcibly awakened from a deep slumber.

The man beside him was still chuckling. “Yes. The little witch! Said she’d manage it somehow when I told her you weren’t taking any. We had a thousand on it, and the little devil has won, outwitted us both. How in thunder did she do it? Laid a trap for you; what?”

Courteney did not answer. The stiffness was spreading. He felt as one turned to stone. Mechanically he yielded to the hand upon his arm, not speaking, scarcely thinking.

And then–almost before he knew it–he was in her presence, face to face with the golden vision that had caught and–for a space at least–had held his heart.

He bowed, still silent, still strangely bound and fettered by the compelling force.

A hand that was lithe and slender and oddly boyish came out to him. A voice that had in it sweet, lilting notes, like the voice of a laughing child, spoke his name.

“Mr. Courteney! How kind!” it said.

As from a distance he heard Grant speak. “Mr. Courteney, allow me to introduce you–my wife!”

There was a dainty movement like the flash of shimmering wings. He looked up. She had thrown back her veil.

He gazed upon her. “Rosemary!”

She looked back at him above the roses with eyes that were deeply purple–as the depths of the sea. “Yes, I am Rosemary–to my friends,” she said.

Ellis Grant was laughing still, in his massive, contented way. “But to her lover,” he said, “she is–and always has been–Rosa Mundi.”

Then speech came back to Courteney, and strength returned. He held himself in firm restraint. He had been stricken, but he did not flinch.

“Your husband?” he said.

She indicated Grant with a careless hand. “Since yesterday,” she said.

He bowed to her again, severely formal. “May I wish you joy?” he said.

There was an instant’s pause, and in that instant something happened. She had not moved. Her eyes still met his own, but it was as if a veil had dropped between them suddenly. He saw the purple depths no more.

“Thank you,” said Rosa Mundi, with her little girlish laugh.

* * * * *

As he strode down the Pier a few minutes later, he likened the scent of the crushed roses that strewed the way to the fumes of sacrifice–sacrifice offered at the feet of a goddess who cared for nothing sacred. Not till long after did he remember the tears that he had seen her shed.