There, against the dense dark foliage, stands out in relief like a billow of the sea, the pale green diaphanous garments which Crystal Meredyth wears to-night, and close beside her a tall figure, that Zai knows too well. Her heart beats fast and a blinding mist seems to rise before her vision, but she has not been tutored by Lady Beranger in vain. “Have you yet to learn, Lord Delaval, that women do not exactly wear their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at?” she says with a low musical laugh, “or do you think Mr. Conway so irresistible that no one can resist him?” As she almost whispers this, her conscience is troubled with a compunctious throb, her glance seeks the tiny, almost invisible, chain to which the locket containing Carl’s picture is attached, and out of the cloistered greenness and dimness Carl Conway’s handsome face seems to look at her reproachfully for denying her love for him. “_So_ glad to hear you speak like this!” Lord Delaval murmurs quite tenderly, and he slightly presses against him the little hand lying so snow-white on his arm, “especially as a little bird has told me something.” “What has it told you?” Zai asks carelessly, while her eyes follow the two figures of her evidently inconstant lover and his companion, with a pathos and wistfulness in their depths that the dusk luckily hides from Lord Delaval. “It told me that Conway is going to marry Miss Meredyth.” For half an instant Zai forgets her Belgravian training. Under the Chinese lanterns her cheeks grow white as death, and there is an unmistakable tremor in her voice as she says: “Are they engaged? But it is not possible!” she adds more slowly. “Why isn’t it possible?” asks Lord Delaval, rousing out of languor into a suspicious condition. “Is it because he has been trying to make you believe that Miss Meredyth’s bank stock and horses and diamonds are of no importance in his opinion?” “Miss Meredyth’s money,” Zai says in a low voice. “I--I did not know she was very rich!” Then she cries impetuously: “How contemptible it is for a man to be mercenary.” “Some men cannot help being so,” he replies quietly. “For instance, what can fellows like Conway, who have no substantial means at all, do?” “Do? Why-- ‘To go and hang yourselves, for being yourselves.’” quoths Zai flippantly, as she moves towards the house. Suddenly she pauses, she _cannot_ go in just now into the crowded ball-room and look with calmness on her faithless--faithless lover. Ah! how unutterably wretched she is. She feels as if life were over for her, now that Carl is going to marry Miss Meredyth.