“Then I suppose you are going to marry Miss Meredyth?” Zai asks in a low voice, that has a hardness in it which no one has heard before. “Zai! can you blame me? Can you think it possible for me to act otherwise?” “No! I don’t blame you!” and again bitterness mars the sweet voice. “Of course you cannot blame me!” he answers, “for you know _you_ are forbidden fruit, Zai. You have been reared in certain social conditions, which of course it would be sheer wickedness on my part to ask you to resign!” This is a very different sentiment to what he has expressed before; and even she, much as she loves him, feels indignant. There is a sudden flash in her grey eyes as she lifts them to his. “You know that you ought not to say this, Carl! It is not my interests you are thinking of, but you have made up your mind not to marry anyone who has no money!” “Granted!” he replies quietly, though a crimson flush dyes his face, and he bites his lip hard. “But though you seem to reproach me, you know why it is so! You know that people in _your_ world cannot subsist on sentiment, or on a few paltry hundreds a year. I am, I avow, one of those miserable devils to whom the bitter irony of fate has given the tastes and habits of a gentleman, without the means of supporting them. You are the corresponding woman. Common sense--the commonest sense--will tell you whether or not it would be sheer madness for us two to marry, although we love each other so passionately, Zai!” Zai does not answer. There cannot be the least doubt, she knows, but that common sense _does_ tell her that marriage with her would not suit Carl Conway; but it is none the less true that common sense is not what she cares to listen to now. In the most vapid soul that sojourn in Belgravia ever starved, there is still some small lodging left for that divine folly that men call “Love.” And Zai, born and bred in Belgravia, is as desperately and honestly in love with this man, who has played fast and loose with her, as a milk-maid could be. She longs--how she longs--for just one crumb of comfort, just one little word of sweetness from his lips. Only a quarter of an hour ago he held her to him and kissed her with apparently the old, old passion in his soul, and now he stands a little apart, calm and cold as a statue. Conway is a wonderfully handsome man, and Zai worships his beauty. The more she looks at him the more she craves for a gleam of love in his brown eyes--the stronger grows her desire to listen to love from his well-cut lips; but she listens in vain. “Yes, I know all that,” she says very wearily, with a dreadfully heart-sick feeling of disappointment, “it was hardly worth while you telling me. I have heard papa and mamma, and Gabrielle, and all the others talk of ‘common sense,’ but one grows tired sometimes of hearing the same thing.” The tone of her voice tells more than her words; there is a betraying quiver in it that makes him turn quickly and look at her.