"If one could live amongst flowers all one's life, away from the crimes and follies of the rest of the world, how happy one might be!" he said to himself half cynically, half sadly, as he stooped to puff away the green-fly from a delicate plant with the smoke of his cigar. "That's impossible, however. There's no chance of a monastery in these modern days! What wouldn't I give just now to be out of all this--this misery--this deviltry?" He put a strong and bitter accent on the last word. "But I see no way out of it--none!" "There is no way out of it--for you," a voice near him said. Without knowing it, he had spoken aloud. This answer to his reverie startled him exceedingly. He wheeled round to discover whence it came, and, to his surprise, found himself close to the open library window, where, just inside the room, a girl was sitting in a low cushioned chair. He took the cigar from his mouth and held it between his fingers as he looked at her, his brow contracting with anger rather than with surprise. He stood thus two or three minutes, as if expecting her to speak, but she did not even raise her eyes. She was a tall, fair girl with hair of the palest flaxen, artistically fluffed out and curled upon her forehead, and woven into a magnificent coronet upon her graceful head; her downcast eyelids were peculiarly large and white, and, when raised, revealed the greatest beauty and the greatest surprise of her face--a pair of velvety dark-brown eyes, which had the curious power of assuming a reddish tint when she was angry or disturbed. Her skin was of the perfect creaminess which sometimes accompanies red hair--and it was whispered by her acquaintances that Florence Lepel's flaxen locks had once been of a decidedly carroty tinge, and that their present pallor had been attained by artificial means. Whether this was the case or not it could not be denied that their color was now very becoming to her pale complexion, and that they constituted the chief of Miss Lepel's many acknowledged charms. For, in a rather strange and uncanny way, Florence Lepel was a beautiful woman; and, though critics said that she was too thin, that her neck was too long, her face too pale and narrow, her hair too colorless for beauty, there were many for whom a distinct fascination lay in the unusual combination of these features. She was dressed from head to foot in sombre black, which made her neck and hands appear almost dazzlingly white. Perhaps it was also the sombreness of her attire which gave a look of fragility--an almost painful fragility--to her appearance. Hubert noted, half unconsciously, that her figure was more willowy than ever, that the veins on her temples and her long white hands were marked with extraordinary distinctness, that there were violet shadows on the large eyelids and beneath the drooping lashes. But, for all that, the bitter sternness of his expression did not change. When he spoke, it was in a particularly severe tone.