“I have got such a headache,” she says wearily (she might say heartache), “and if I go into that suffocating room, it will be worse. Then to-morrow I shall make my appearance at breakfast with great haggard eyes, red-rimmed and underlined with bistre shades, and a horrid white face that will draw down _such_ a scolding from mamma and Trixy! _You_ know well enough all I shall have to endure.” The trivial bond of sympathy which her stress on the “you” seems to indicate sounds strangely pleasant to his ears, but he preserves a silence, though he gazes at her fixedly. For, under the flickering light, Zai is truly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. “Lord Delaval, _will_ you do me a very great favour?” she pleads prettily, glancing up at him. “Of course!” he answers rather dreamily. He is a Society man, a scoffer at sentiment, an Atheist in love, but this little girl’s ways and proximity exercise a curious influence over him. They are in fact something like the opium trance, of which De Quincey gives so wonderful a description in the “Suspiria.” He is conscious of an intense longing that the favour she asks will be to kiss her! He feels at this moment that he would willingly give up everything in the world, his successes of the past, his hopes for the future, his schemes in the present, just for the sake of touching this soft scarlet mouth once, “To waste his whole soul in one kiss Upon these perfect lips,” in fact, but there is an inexplicable sensation of reverence for her that no other woman has ever raised in his breast. And there is a purity in the face shewing up in the semi-light, that fills him, _blasé_ as he is--satiated as he is, with a wonderment that no woman’s face has ever created in him before. “I want to go right round the garden.” The request is so simple, so childish, that it brings him down at once from the height to which imagination has raised him to practical every-day existence, and he laughs aloud at his own sentimental folly. “But what will they say to our escapade? The garden is a large one, and it is close upon twelve o’clock now. You know how strict Lady Beranger’s notions are regarding the _bienséances_, and that such a nocturnal excursion will be in her eyes, flagrant. Unless indeed,” and he lowers his voice to the most harmonious key, “you were with a man you were engaged to!” She does not seem to hear, or else she does not heed, the concluding words of his sentence, a deafness and indifference on her part that rails him considerably.