“I’ll come in five minutes, Gabrielle,” Zai answers absently, and as soon as Gabrielle’s tall figure is out of sight, she forgets her promise in a delicious little reverie, in which the sunlight, glinting down through the tangled boughs, touches her cheek with the deepest pink and adds a softer lustre to her sweet grey eyes. “I will never marry any one but you Carl, so long as I live,” she says half aloud fervently, then she glances furtively around, and when she finds she is all alone with the sunshine, the swaying leaves, the emerald grass, the foolish child devours with passionate kisses a tiny gold ring, which, after the fashion of romantic school-girls, is attached by a thin cord that encircles her pretty white throat, and rests night and day on the loving, fluttering heart that the same C. C., actor, pauper and detrimental, has taken possession of, wholly and solely. [Illustration] CHAPTER III. AFTERNOON TEA. “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” Reveries cannot last for ever, even with Carl Conway’s handsome face present in them, and Zai starts to find that the sun-god is making rapid tracks westward, and remembers that Sandilands is one of those clockwork houses where unpunctuality at meals is a cardinal sin. It is hard; for Zai, like a good many other girls who are in love, has no appetite. She fed to repletion on soft words and softer caresses in Belgrave Square, the night of the ball. And she wants nothing now until--until--some more of the same kind of nectar is given her. She walks slowly down a narrow path fringed on either side thickly by glossy shrubs, and which leads to the back of the house, and indifferent to the regard and gossip of high life below stairs, runs up to her own room. The sun has climbed up quite high in the western sky, and, enthroned in golden raiment, pours down such a reflection of his yellow glory on the toilette table, that she stands for a moment blinking and winking her pretty eyes like a newborn puppy. Then she suddenly recollects something Gabrielle had told her, and stooping, stares hard at herself in her mirror. She dreads to find that she has really grown white and thin, that she has “gone off” according to Lord Delaval’s verdict. The thought that Carl, who is so fastidious in his ideal of beauty, may find her wanting is too awful; so she falls to examining feature by feature eagerly. These are what the looking-glass reflects back.