Her nature is perverse like other women’s, coveting what seems difficult to gain, undervaluing what is willingly offered. “My dear Flora, now you are yourself again,” he says carelessly, just sweeping his moustache across her brow, and then sinking into the arms of a capacious _fauteuil_, “and I don’t mind confiding to you the lamentable fact that I am deuced hard up. What with garments for the stage, and off the stage, button-holes for the Park and the balls (Hooper in Oxford Street had the impudence to charge me three-and-sixpence for a gardenia the other day), I am just at the end of my tether. I want a new hat, new gloves, a new kit altogether, and devil a bit do I know who to squeeze the tin out of. I _must_ sacrifice myself to a fortune, you see.” “Oh, Carl, but it’s hateful the thought of your marrying anyone else. If it wasn’t for some silly prejudice you might marry me; I have got heaps of money you know.” Yes, he does know, and that how the money was got is a fact that it is better not to enquire into. Marry her? marry the leading lady of the Bagatelle Theatre? when he is a regular swell himself, in spite of his being an actor! The shade of his uncle, the Marquis of Eversleigh, forbid it! He stares at her incredulously, and seeing she is in earnest bursts into a loud laugh. The next moment he asks her pardon for his rudeness, for Carl is a gentleman born. “You are cruel to me, very cruel,” she sobs, always with a due regard to the artistic, “but you will promise me one thing, won’t you, Carl? It is that, once married, and the fortune secured, I shall see you again as often as I do now.” “All right, Flora, but that will be on one condition. It is that you won’t bother me with letters or anything. Letters are so deuced dangerous, you know, especially if one’s wife gets hold of them, and grows close-fisted with the pocket-money. If I marry Crystal Meredyth,” he adds to himself, “she’ll have to fork out pretty considerably to make up for the amount of insipid talk that falls from her lips. Now if it was Zai! Ah! I’d take her with nothing, and work like a slave to keep my dainty little girl clothed like a princess, but she has thrown me over for that lardy-dardy swell, and joy go with her.” “Good-night, Flora,” he says, rising lazily, “and mind and keep my counsel. If father and mother Meredyth, who are the properest couple alive, were to hear one whisper about you, they would send me flying.” “I’ll keep your counsel, Carl; I wouldn’t injure a hair of your head, not to save my life.” “Well, perhaps you wouldn’t, little woman, or perhaps you would, _cela selon_. I never had much faith in mankind, or womankind either to say the truth, and I am too old in worldly wisdom to begin now--ta-ta.” END OF VOLUME I. PRINTED BY KELLY AND CO., GATE STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS, AND KINGSTON-ON-THAMES.