But Mrs. Highcamp had one more touch to add to the picture. She took from the back of her chair a white silken scarf, with which she had covered her shoulders in the early part of the evening. She draped it across the boy in graceful folds, and in a way to conceal his black, conventional evening dress. He did not seem to mind what she did to him, only smiled, showing a faint gleam of white teeth, while he continued to gaze with narrowing eyes at the light through his glass of champagne.

“Oh! to be able to paint in color rather than in words!” exclaimed Miss Mayblunt, losing herself in a rhapsodic dream as she looked at him.

“ ‘There was a graven image of Desire

Painted with red blood on a ground of gold.’ ”