“Quite, _quite_ true, so help me Heaven! Marguerite, you don’t _really_ doubt me! Have you lived till now, and never learnt that a man often fears to try and climb to the highest pinnacle of his desire, be it for fame, or fortune, or bliss, lest he fall before he has tasted it. Don’t you know what your face can do to a man?” She shakes her head, and the bright light glistening on it seems to turn each tress to living gold. “It can send him into a dream of Heaven! fire his soul with rapture, or drive him mad with disappointment and regret!” He pauses, a little breathless. Sentiment is not a plant of common or spontaneous growth in our aristocracy, and it is not at all in Lord Delaval’s line. The age is far too practical for it, more’s the pity. He is, in fact, a little astonished at his flight of eloquence, mediocre though it be, and a little silence ensues. Then Marguerite Ange leans forward, puts her white hand, all sparkling with gems, on his arm and looks up in his face. He is certainly the handsomest man she has ever seen. “The _last_ would never be _your_ fate,” she says, in a low, thrilling tone; but he hears her, of course. Trust a man, even if he is partially deaf, not to hear any sort of incense to his vanity, if he can hear nothing else; and this man is especially vain, from the top of his blond head to the sole of his well-made boot. His ultramarine eyes kindle at once into great fires, and the red spots glow on his cheeks to match. “Do you know what your face has done to me, Marguerite?” he asks slowly. She does not reply, but somehow this face of hers seems to have come nearer him, and through a bewildered haze he sees nothing but a pair of lips, soft and maddening; a pair of eyes, black as midnight, lustrous as two stars, with a depth of passion in their liquid depths that stirs his pulse and makes his head whirl. It is a picture that brings oblivion of everything, save of dangerous proximity. “I told you a falsehood the other day, Marguerite, when I said I was not married. I _am_ married! I have not been married two years, and I married for _love_. My wife loves me with all her soul, and it would break her heart to lose me, and yet--Heaven forgive me!--I feel to-night as if I _hated her_! because she seems to rise up between you and me.” She averts her face, and a little smile passes quickly over her mouth--a smile that has triumph in it, a smile that is absolutely _wicked_. “When I entered this house to-night something told me of the end. It seems utter folly for a man to go mad over a woman’s face like this, doesn’t it? But, Marguerite, it _is_ so. I _have_ gone mad, I believe, for, strangers as we were but three short days ago, I love you as I _never_ loved anyone before! I swear it, Marguerite!” She does not smile now at his rhapsody. She knows he is watching her, and he sees nothing but the sweetest, tenderest light in the wonderful eyes, a softer look on the perfect mouth.