She was even meditating a retreat, inexplicably embarrassed, when an inner door opened and Lady Victoria entered. She wore a tea-gown of a sort, black and yellow, open over the soft lace of a chemisette, although a dog-collar of tiny golden sequins clasped her throat. In her hair a golden butterfly trembled, and in that light she would have looked little older than her guest had it not been for the expression of her face. It was this expression that arrested Isabel even more than the toilette, as she moved towards the divan without a word of greeting. It looked as if it had been put on with the costume, both intended to express a mood of the wearer: which might have been that of a tigress whose ferocity was slowly awakening with the approach of the victim. The black eyes were heavy with the lust of conquest, the points of the mouth turned up more sharply than usual; there was an insatiable vanity in the commanding poise of her head. She was as little like the woman of the morning as the sun is like the midnight, and Isabel experienced a positive terror of her. Feeling sixteen and very foolish, she sank to the edge of a chair and muttered something about the charm of the room. Then, as Lady Victoria, who had arranged herself among the shining pillows, continued to stare at her with absolutely no change of expression, it dawned upon her that she had not been expected but that some one else was. With too little presence of mind left to retire gracefully and too much pride to appear to have ventured into the cave of Venus unasked, she managed to articulate her gratitude for the invitation of the morning. "Oh!" Lady Victoria's eyebrows expressed a flicker of intelligence. "I hope you have managed not to bore yourself." Isabel plunged into an account of her drive, to which Lady Victoria, who had lit a long Russian cigarette, paid no attention whatever. Her expression was still petrified, except that she might have had the scent of blood in her slightly dilating nostrils. Suddenly the slow flame in her eyes burned upward, and Isabel, her head fairly jerking about, saw that a man had entered and was advancing rapidly across the room, his heavy eyes wide with admiration. It was the Frenchman whom Lady Victoria had honored with so much of her attention the evening before. He raised to his lips the pointed fingers negligently extended, and murmured something to which Lady Victoria replied in French as pure and fluent as his own; and in a low rich voice, with not an echo in it of her habitual abruptness or haughty languor.