“The fascinations of Mr. Conway! Joy go with her! Men are not fair judges of their own sex, but if I was a woman, I should prefer old Stubbs to a dozen Conways!” “And so should I--_now_,” Zai confesses meekly. “What a pity women have not the gift of _clair-voyance_!” “Thank God, they haven’t!” he says to himself, as he rises, and walking up to the mirror on the mantel, looks at himself. “I wonder what Mademoiselle Ange saw in me to make her faint? It could not have been my _ugliness_!” he thinks, as the glass reflects back his handsome face--a face which he _knows_ to be handsome and irresistible to most women. Then he turns away carelessly--for he is not a vain man--and going up to his wife kisses her on her forehead. But Zai is not satisfied with this. “Won’t you kiss me properly, darling?” she says, holding up her fresh, red lips. And her darling kisses her “properly,” though all the while he is wronging her in his heart, on the principle that sins of _omission_ are as bad as sins of _commission_! [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. IN THE MESHES. “Take hands and part with laughter, Touch lips and part with tears, Once more, and no more after, Whatever comes with years. We twain shall not remeasure The ways that left us twain, Nor crush the lees of pleasure From sanguine grapes of pain.” Lord Delaval has never let a desire of his remain ungratified in his life, so now, haunted by the beauty of a woman for the space of twenty-four hours, he resolves to make her acquaintance. “Her sort are not very particular about the _convenances_,” he says to himself as he approaches _Numèro 17 Rue de Tronchet_, but it must be confessed that his courage does not rear its crest much aloft as he rings the bell, and hears from the _concierge_ that “Mademoiselle Ange _est chez elle_.” Still, though his mind is perturbed, his pulses throb, and there is a mingling of expectation and trepidation in his breast, if his _real_ feelings were finely analysed, it would be found that Mademoiselle’s beauty repels even while it attracts him to the point of looking on it closer. Possibly the daylight may dissipate his delusion, he thinks. And he is conscious of a sort of half-hope, half-regret, that it may be so. The apartment, into which he is ushered by Mademoiselle’s own smart _soubrette_, disappoints him at once. The decorations are florid and over-done. The big mirrors gleam too brightly on the sea-green of the walls, the vivid scarlet of the ottomans, the chairs, the velvet cushions, the too heavily perfumed atmosphere, the curious medley of _objets d’art_, individually costly, but making a strange and heterogeneous whole, all seem to his fastidious eyes as redolent of the Alcazar.