Sackcloth and ashes are the garments she should wear, poor, passionate, reckless creature, a victim to a worldling’s fickleness. And Gabrielle, the cynical, the votary of Balzac and Georges Sand, the unbeliever in true feeling, wept bitterly over the wreck that had been made of her life “for one man’s pleasure only.” Her strictly worldly surroundings forbade her from giving way to an honest violent grief that would serve for sluice-gates to her heart. And she smothered back the sobs that broke from her with a rapidity of passion that she couldn’t restrain. Poor soul, that a sojourn in Belgravia had starved, it could find no balm in Gilead, no physician, now that the one human creature she had placed on a pedestal to worship had tumbled down ignominiously, to her thinking the veriest lump of clay. And she writhed as she remembered that not only by words and looks, but even by kisses on her red lips, he had betrayed her. She positively wailed out her misery and her wrath in a low deep wail, weird enough to be a cry from one of Dante’s lost souls. Yet-- “Is it worth a tear? is it worth an hour? To think of things that are well outworn, Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dreams foregone, and the deed forborne?” Had she not lived long enough in her twenty-six years to know that man and fickleness are synonymous terms, and to be avoided? Apparently not--for even while she groans and moans over his shortcomings, a mighty love fills her for the man whom she adores with a wild, unreasoning, selfish passion, and whose happiness she would immolate unscrupulously, if it pleased her to have it so. It must be owned that Lord Delaval is both a flirt and a butterfly, and that he has played fast and loose with mostly all the pretty women he has come across. Flirting comes to him as to the manner born; it lurks in his ultramarine eyes, in the corners of his mouth, in his voice, in his manners, and in his actions, and he thinks nothing of it. Some women regret his love, some resign themselves to his fickle ways, but Gabrielle Beranger is not of the common herd. She is a law unto herself in all things. She can love well (in her fashion) and she can hate well, with her great black gleaming orbs, her white passion-tossed features, her tumultuous, unscrupulous spirit. She regrets now, bitterly, but she does not dream of growing resigned. “_Tout vient a celui qui sait attendre_,” she mutters to herself. Lord Delaval has laid a burthen on her which she cannot bear. She has but one stimulus left in life, but one object. It is to appeal to him--to his honour--to his love. If she fails--but she does not dream of failing. One thing, she will separate the man she loves, and the man who has loved her, after the fashion of some men’s love, from her step-sister. If not now, she will some day, even if Zai marries him.