"I don't know about breaking my heart, Val-hearts are tough things, I fancy, but I should feel like cutting my throat if you threw me over," he had said.

Poor old Jack! it is well for him that no necromantic mirror is by, or perchance the morning light might fall on a dead man's face.

154

CHAPTER VII.

A REGISTERED VOW.

"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot

That it do singe yourself."

SHAKESPEARE.

HEN Val wakes up to a recollection

WH

of her moonlight escapade, she feels herself terribly abashed and humiliated both. The memory of that kiss sends the blood flying to her temples, and makes even her ears tingle hotly. She is an embryo coquette. To this fact, of course, there is no denial. From babyhood incipient signs of coquetry have made themselves apparent in her pretty, coaxing ways, her pouting

mouth, her capricious smiles, her fondness for pink and blue sleeve knots and sashes, her care of the coral necklace that adorned her tiny throat. Coquetry is indigenous in all female nature to a greater or lesser degree. There is not a woman under the sun in whom it does not develop itself, somehow and somewhere and sometime. The veriest prudes are coquettes at heart, and the only difference between them and the "fast" ones of the sex is that flirtation is carried on sub rosâ—but it is carried on all the same. Coquetry and Valérie Egerton are at any rate synonymous terms, although she has vegetated along with roses and strawberries and apricots, and other sweet things, in an out of the way place, for the period of her life; and she has moreover required no forcing-house to bring out the quality to perfection; still her coquetry hitherto has been purely harmless and

theoretical, in lieu of practical. The spell of moonlight gone, and the subtle glance of Keith Fairfax's dark grey eyes removed, Val realises fully, awfully, the baseness of his conduct.

Pleading a headache as an excuse for not joining Mr. Egerton at breakfast, she throws a white wrapper about her, shoves her little feet into slippers that Cinderella might envy, and seats herself before her mirror, hairbrush in hand. She is about to "think."

The greater number of women show to better advantage by candlelight. It softens down blemishes, rounds unseemly angles, and gives a purer tint or a greater radiance. But Val's face is so perfect that the early morning or the garish daylight suit her best. There are no angles or flaws to be brought out, and the rose-bloom and creamy skin are able to defy criticism from the sharpest eyes and the strongest light. The large

dark eyes rest on the mirror unconsciously, and the even white teeth are set.

"Insolent!" she says, half aloud, and she clenches the handle of the brush more tightly in her small grip. "He evidently thinks me a child-a pretty child-to be kissed and caressed by any strange man that has a mind to do it! But I'll teach him! If Jack knew!" And the curves round the red lips soften a shade. "Poor old Jack! —dear good honourable Jack!— he wouldn't have dared to kiss me like that-no, not even to save his life! And I believe a kiss from me would save his life! But that man, who fancies me a toy, a plaything for five minutes' amusement, shall find to his cost what I am!"

She catches a glimpse of her excited face, her hot, quivering mouth, in the glass, at this moment.

"Any way, he forgot that Spanish beauty