Zai answers nothing. With a sharp pang of misery and jealousy, she, too, has noticed how devoted Carl seems. _Après cela le Déluge._ She is thankful when her mother orders “Home.” She is sick of bowing and smiling when she would like to lie down and die; but nevertheless she trips airily down to the dining-room, eats more dinner than is her habit, and after this goes into the conservatory and plucks a couple of the reddest roses she can find. “Fanchette, make me awfully pretty to-night!” she coaxes, and the _femme de chambre_ is nothing loth. Zai has every “possibility,” as she calls it, of being _belle comme un ange_, and more than satisfies her exquisite Parisian taste when her toilette is complete. “She wants but two little wings to make her a veritable angel,” Fanchette says to the English maid who assists her in her duties. “Mees Zai is the flower of the house!” “Flower of the _flock_, you mean,” Jane corrects. “No, I do not,” Fanchette replies, offended. “I have _never_ heard of flowers in a flock. I have heard of a flock of goose--and _you_ are one of them.” Meanwhile, Zai stands before her mirror. Her eyes are so sad--so sad, that they look too large for her small white face. “Oh, Carl! Carl!” she says, half aloud, “you have forgotten me quite! And I love you--love you so much that my heart is broken, Carl!” “Zai, the carriage is ready,” cries Baby, drumming her knuckles on the closed door. Zai starts guiltily. What right has she to be murmuring love words to a man who will soon be another woman’s husband! She clasps a pearl necklace round her throat, fastens a pearl star into her bonnie brown hair, then pauses one moment. It is the first time in her life that she has ever had recourse to the foreign aid of ornament, and it seems quite an awful thing to her. But no one must guess at her feelings from her wan face to-night. She had not been proud with Carl because she loved him so, but she must be proud with the world, and not wear her poor desolate heart on her sleeve for daws to peck at. She takes the two roses she plucked, pulls off their petals mercilessly, then rubs them on her cheeks, and flinging on her cloak she runs downstairs. Lady Beranger is putting the finishing touches to her elaborate dress of primrose satin and _point de Flandre_, in which she looks like an empress, and only the three girls are assembled in the hall when Zai appears. “How do I look?” she asks, throwing off her wrap. “Fanchette says I look _belle comme un ange_, and I want to be especially beautiful to-night!” “What for?” three voices ask at once. “It’s only a State Ball, on the pattern of all the others we have been to. The Queen won’t be there to make anything different. So what on earth does it signify how you look?”