Silas Grangerson came to town on the Wednesday, driving in and reaching the Charleston Hotel about five o’clock in the afternoon.

The Grangersons scarcely ever used the railway.  Silas, often as he had been in Charleston, had never put foot in a street car; even a hired conveyance was against the prejudices of these gentlemen.

This antagonism towards public means of locomotion was not in the least the outcome of snobbishness or pride; they had come from a race of people accustomed to move in a small orbit in their own particular way, an exclusive people, breeders and lovers of horses, a people to whom locomotion had always meant pride in the means and the method; to take a seat in a stuffy railway car at so much a mile, to grab a ticket and squeeze into a tram car, to drive in a cab drawn by an indifferent horse would have been hateful to these people; it was scarcely less so to their descendants.

So Silas came to Charleston driving a pair of absolutely matched chestnuts, a coloured manservant in the Grangerson livery in attendance.

After dinner he strolled into the bar of the hotel, met some friends, made some bets on the forthcoming races and at eight o’clock retired upstairs to dress.

He was one of the first of the guests to arrive.

The Rhetts’ house in Legare Street was about the same size as Vernons and equally old, but it had not the same charm, the garden was much larger than that at Vernons, but it had not the same touch of the past.  Houses, like people, have personalities and the house of the Rhetts had a telephone without resenting the intruder, electric everythings, even to an elevator, modern cookers, modern stoves, everything in a modern way to save labour and make life easy, and all so cunningly and craftily done that the air of antiquity was supposed not to be disturbed.

Illusion!  Nothing is gained without some sacrifice; you cannot hold the past and the present in the same hand, the concealed elevator spoke in all the rooms once its presence was betrayed, the telephone talked ­everywhere was evident the use of yesterday as a veneer of to-day.

However that may be, the old house was gay enough to-night with flowers and lights, and Silas, looking better perhaps than he had ever looked in his life, found himself talking to Frances Rhett with an animation that surprised himself.

Frances had never had a chance of leading Silas behind her chariot; to fool with her would have meant an expenditure of time and energy in journeys to Charleston quite beyond his inclination.  This aloofness coupled with his good looks had set him apart from others.

But to-night he was quite a different being; to-night, in some mysterious way, he managed to convey the impression, pleasing enough, that he had come to see her and her alone.

As they stood together for a moment, he led the talk into Charleston channels, asking about this person and that till the folk at Vernons came on the tapis.

“Is it true what I hear, that Richard Pinckney has become engaged to the girl who is staying there?” asked Silas.

Frances smiled.

“I don’t think so,” she replied.  “Who told you?”

“Upon my word I forget,” said he, “but I judged mostly by my own eyes ­they seemed like an engaged couple when I saw them last.”

New guests were arriving and she had to go forward to help in receiving them.  Silas moved towards her, but in the next moment they had for a snatch of conversation, she did not refer to the subject, nor did he.

The Vernons people were late, so late that when they arrived they were the last of the guests; dancing was in progress and, on entering the ballroom, Richard Pinckney was treated to the pleasing sight of his fiancee whirling in the arms of Silas Grangerson.

Phyl, looking lovely in the simple, rather old-fashioned dress evolved for her by the combined geniuses of Maria Pinckney and Madame Organdie, produced that sensation which can only be evoked by newness, her effect was instantaneous and profound, it touched not only every one of these strangers but also Maria Pinckney and Richard.  They had come with her, but it was only in the ballroom that they recognised with whom they had come.

So with a book, a picture, a play, the producer and his friends only recognise its merits fully when it is staged and condemned or praised by the public.

A debutante fails or succeeds at first glance, and the instantaneous success of Phyl was a record in successes.

And Frances Rhett had to watch it and dance.  The Inquisition had its torments; Society has improved on them, for her victims cannot cry out and the torments of Frances Rhett were acute.  Not that she was troubling much about Richard Pinckney and what the poisonous Silas had said; she was not in love with Richard Pinckney, but she was passionately in love with herself.  She was the belle of Charleston; had been for the last year; and one of her chief incentives to marriage was an intuitive knowledge that prestige fades, that the position of principal girl in any society is like the position of the billiard ball the juggler balances on the end of a cue ­precarious.  She wanted to get married and ring down the curtain on an unspoiled success, and now in a moment she saw herself dethroned.

In a moment.  For no jeweller of Amsterdam ever had an eye for the quality of diamonds surer than the eye of Frances Rhett for the quality of other women’s beauty.  At the first glance to-night, she saw what others saw, though more clearly than they, that it was the touch of the past that gave Phyl her cachet, a something indefinable from yesterday, the lack of which made the other girls, by contrast, seem cheap.

Never could she have imagined that the “red-headed girl at Vernons” could gain so much from setting, a setting due to the instinct as well as the taste of “that old Maria Pinckney.”

She had always laughed at Maria, as young people sometimes will at the old.

When Richard came up to her a little later on, he found himself coldly received; she had no dances for him except a few at the bottom of the programme.

“You shouldn’t have been late,” said she.

“Well,” he said, “it was not my fault.  You know what Aunt Maria is, she kept us ten minutes after the carriage was round, and then Phyl wasn’t ready.”

“She looks ready enough now,” said the other, looking at Phyl and the cluster of young men around her.  “What delayed her?  Was she dyeing her head?  It doesn’t look quite so loud as when I saw her last.”

“Her head’s all right,” replied Pinckney, irritated by the manner of the other, “inside and out, and one can’t say the same for every one.”

Frances looked at him.

“Do you know what Silas Grangerson asked me to-night?” she said.

“No.”

“He asked me were you engaged to her.”

“Phyl?”

“Miss Berknowles.  I don’t know her well enough to call her Phyl.”

“He asked you that?”

“Yes, said every one was talking of it, and the last time he saw you together you looked like an engaged couple the way you were carrying on.”

“But he has never seen us together,” cried the outraged Pinckney; “that was a pure lie.”

“I expect he saw you when you didn’t see him; anyhow, that’s the impression people have got, and it’s not very pleasant for me.”

Richard Pinckney choked back his anger.  He fell to thinking where Silas could have seen them together.

“I don’t know whether he saw us or not,” said he, “but I am certain of one thing; he never saw us ‘carrying on’ as you call it; anyhow, I’ll have a personal explanation from Silas to-morrow.”

“Please don’t imagine that I object to your flirting with any one you like,” said Frances with exasperating calm.  “If you have a taste for that sort of thing it is your own business.”

Pinckney flushed.

“I don’t know if you want to quarrel with me,” said he, “if you do, say so at once.”

“Not a bit,” she replied, “you know I never quarrel with any one, it’s bad form for one thing and it is waste of energy for another.”

A man came up to claim her for the next dance and she went off with him, leaving Pinckney upset and astonished at her manner and conduct.

It was their first quarrel, the first result of their engagement.  Frances had seemed all laziness and honey up to this; like many another woman she began to show her real nature now that Pinckney was secured.

But it was not an ordinary lovers’ quarrel; her anger had less to do with Richard Pinckney than with Phyl.  Her hatred of Phyl, big as a baobab tree, covered with its shadow Vernons, Miss Pinckney, and Richard.

He was part of the business of her dethronement.

Richard wandered off to where Maria Pinckney was seated watching the dancers.

“Why aren’t you dancing?” asked she.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied.  “I’m not keen on it and there are loads of men.”

Miss Pinckney had watched him talking to Frances Rhett and she had drawn her own deductions, but she said nothing.  He sat down beside her.  He had been wanting to tell her of his engagement for a long time past, but had put it off and put it off, waiting for the psychological moment.  Maria Pinckney was a very difficult person to fit into a psychological moment.

“I want to tell you something,” said he.  “I’m engaged to Frances Rhett.”

“Engaged to be married to her?”

“Yes.”

Miss Pinckney was dumb.

What she had always dreaded had come to pass, then.

“You don’t congratulate me?”

“No,” she replied.  “I don’t.”

Then, all of a sudden, she turned on him.

“Congratulate you!  If I saw you drowning in the harbour, would you expect me to stand at the Battery waving my hand to you and congratulating you?  No, I don’t congratulate you.  You had the chance of being happy with the most beautiful girl in the world, and the best, and you’ve thrown it away to pick up with that woman.  Phyl would have married you, I know it, she would have made you happy, I know it, for I know her and I know you.  Now it’s all spoiled.”

He rose to his feet.  It was the first time in his life that he had seen Maria Pinckney really put out.

“I’ll talk to you again about it,” said he.  Then he moved away.

He had the pleasure of watching Frances dancing the next waltz with Silas Grangerson, and Silas had the pleasure of watching him as he stood talking to one of the elderly ladies and looking on.

Silas’s rabbit trap was in reality a very simple affair, it was a plan to pick a quarrel with Richard through Frances, if possible; to make the imperturbable Pinckney angry, knowing well how easily an angry man can be induced to make a fool of himself.  To keep cool and let Richard do the shouting.

Unfortunately for Silas, the sight of Phyl in all her beauty had raised his temperature far above the point of coolness.  There were moments when he was dancing, when he could have flung Frances aside, torn Phyl from the arms of her partner and made off with her through the open window.

This dance was a deadly business for him.  It was the one thing needed to cap and complete the strange fascination this girl exercised upon his mind, his imagination, his body.  It was only now that he realised that nothing else at all mattered in the world, it was only now that he determined to have her or die.

Silas was of the type that kills under passion, the type that, unable to have, destroys.

Preparing a trap for another, he himself had walked into a trap constructed by the devil, stronger than steel.

Yet he never once approached or tried to speak to Phyl.  He fed on her at a distance.  Fleeting glimpses of the curves of her figure, the Titian red of her hair, the face that to-night might have turned a saint from his vows, were snatched by him and devoured.  He would not have danced with her if he could.  To take her in his arms would have meant covering her face with kisses.  Nor did he feel the least anger against the men with whom she danced.  All that was a sham and an unreality, they were shadows.  He and Phyl were the only real persons in that room.

Later on in the evening, Richard Pinckney, tired with the lights and the noise, took a stroll in the garden.

The garden was lit here and there with fairy lamps and there were coigns of shadow where couples were sitting out chatting and enjoying the beauty of the night.

The moon was nearing the full and her light cut the tree shadows distinctly on the paths.  Passing a seat occupied by one of the sitting out couples, Pinckney noticed the woman’s fan which her partner was playing with; it was his own gift to Frances Rhett.  The man was Silas Grangerson and the woman was Frances.  They were talking, but as he passed them their voices ceased.

He felt their eyes upon him, then, when he had got twenty paces or so away, he heard Frances laugh.

He imagined that she was laughing at him.  Already angry with Silas, he halted and half turned, intending to go back and have it out with him, then he thought better of it and went his way.  He would deal with Silas later and in some place where he could get him alone or in the presence of men only.  Pinckney had a horror of scenes, especially in the presence of women.

Twenty minutes later he had his opportunity.  He was crossing the hall from the supper room, when he came face to face with Silas.  They were alone.

“Excuse me,” said Richard Pinckney, halting in front of the other, “I want a word with you.”

“Certainly,” answered Silas, guessing at once what was coming.

“You made some remarks about me to Miss Rhett this evening,” went on the other.  “You coupled my name with the name of a lady in a most unjustifiable manner and I want your explanation here and now.”

“Who was the lady?” asked Silas, seemingly quite unmoved.

“Miss Berknowles.”

“In what way did I couple your name with her, may I ask?”

“No, you mayn’t.”  Richard had turned pale before the calm insolence of the other.  “You know quite well what you said and if you are a gentleman you will apologise ­ If you aren’t you won’t and I will deal with you in Charleston accordingly.”

Phyl was at that moment coming out of the supper room with young Reggie Calhoun ­the same who, according to Richard that morning at breakfast long ago, was an admirer of Maria Pinckney.

She saw the two men, in profile, facing one another, and she saw Silas’s right hand, which he was holding behind his back, opening and shutting convulsively.

She saw the blow given by Pinckney, she saw Silas step back and the knife which he always carried, as the wasp carries its sting, suddenly in his hand.

Then she was gripping his wrist.

Face to face with madness for a moment, holding it, fighting eye to eye.

Had she faltered, had her gaze left his for the hundredth part of a second, he would have cast her aside and fallen upon his prey.

It was her soul that held him, her spirit ­call it what you will, the something that speaks alone through the eye.

Calhoun and Pinckney stood, during that tremendous moment, stricken, breathless, without making the slightest movement.  They saw she was holding him by the power of her eye alone; so vividly did this fact strike them that for a dazed moment it seemed to them that the battle was not theirs, that the contest was beyond the earthly plane, that this was no struggle between human beings, but a battle between sanity and madness.

Its duration might have been spanned by three ticks of the great old clock that stood in the corner of the hall telling the time.

Then came the ring of the knife falling on the floor.  It was like the breaking of a spell.  Silas, white and bewildered-looking as a man suddenly awakened from sleep, stood looking now at his released hand as though it did not belong to him, then at Pinckney, and then at Phyl who had turned her back upon him and was tottering as though about to fall.  Pinckney, stepping forward, was about to speak, when at that moment the door of the supper room opened and a band of young people came out chatting and laughing.

Calhoun, who was a man of resource, kicked the knife which slithered away under one of the seats.  Phyl, recovering herself, walked away towards the stairs; Silas without a word, turned and vanished from sight past the curtain of the corridor that led to the cloakroom.

Calhoun and Pinckney were left alone.

“What are you going to do?” asked Calhoun.

“I am at his disposal,” replied the other.  “I struck him.”

“Struck him, damnation!  He drew a knife on you; he ought to be hoofed out of the club; he’d have had you only for that girl.  I never saw anything so splendid in my life.”

“Yes,” said Pinckney, “she saved my life.  He was clean mad, but thank God no one knows anything about it and we avoided a scene.  Say nothing to any one unless he wants to push the matter further.  I am quite at his disposal.”