Every word, every glance she gives, tortures this impassioned, impetuous Frenchman, and he determines to dog her steps and her house to find out the mystery that drives him wild. “When’s the new play coming out, Chavard?” Scoboloff asks, gloating, _gourmet_ as he is, on the lusciousness of an apricot before him. Chavard has written a play which his clique declare will take Paris by storm, and, intolerably vain of his brains, he is of their opinion. “In about a month or two,” he answers. “Shocking bad time for that sort of thing, isn’t it? No one will be left in Paris.” “No one at all to speak of--only about a couple of millions!” “Keep your smartness for your play, _mon cher_. Of course I meant no one in Society.” “I don’t mind _that_. You swells are so phlegmatic, you see. The _canaille_ laugh, and clap, and hoot, and shout at my work, and thoroughly appreciate my pet points, but the golden youth sleep always, snore even, through my best situations.” “Quite true!” cries Leonide Leroux. “I have often noticed them yawn when I have been dying _so_ beautifully in the Sphinx. What makes swells so sleepy, I wonder?” “Affectation--a little _ennui_--and a great deal of dinner,” says Chavard. “Let us go into the drawing-room and have some music,” Marguerite suggests, feeling possibly that at the supper-table she and Lord Delaval are too much _en evidence_. So they all go, and Leonide Leroux sings them _Il Bacio_ deliciously in a lovely soprano, while Marguerite lounges as usual in a large chair, and her eyes glance frequently at a group near the window of smokers, and which is composed of Scoboloff, Delaval and Rose Marigny, who puffs away prettily at a dainty _Sultan doux_, and evidently is no novice in the accomplishment. Presently De Belcour draws near his hostess--De Belcour, with half his beauty spoiled by scowling eyes and a frown on his brow. “Why waste your glances on people who don’t appreciate them?” he asks, in a low voice that has a sullen ring in it. She laughs, and does not answer, so he pulls viciously at his long moustache to vent his anger on something, since he is afraid to vent it on her. “You spoke the truth at supper to-night, Marguerite, when you said to woo a woman was a sure way not to win her; and yet, poets rave about the softness and the tenderness of women, and call them the link that unites earth with Heaven. _Sapristi!_ for cold-blooded cruelty, for passionless devilment, a woman is to a man what a hawk is to a dove, a tigress to a tame cat!” Marguerite elevates her pencilled brows slightly. “I wish you would try and be less violent and abusive in your talk, Monsieur le Marquis: if you _must_ talk to me, let the talk be endurable, anyway.” He clenches his teeth to suppress the oath that rises to his lips.