"Mademoiselle," Count Vladimir's courteous, cool tones were saying, "will you honour me by the acceptance of this rose? The royal flower, _par excellence_, over all other flowers, as one of your own English writers, John Ruskin, says. If I may be permitted to suggest so bold an idea, it will enhance, and be enhanced, by a place in your corsage." He held out the flower, smiling as he did so, and she took it mechanically, and fastened it amidst the black laces that draped her shoulders and bosom; it dropped its golden head lovingly upon them, while its perfume rose and fell with the pulsations of her heart. Vladimir drew a chair opposite to her and sat down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and his keen eyes noting each fluctuating expression of her face, each flutter of the laces above her unquiet breast, each nervous movement of her hands in their long, loose Suède coverings. He had a dangerous game to play, and upon his success or defeat depended his winning or losing Olga. As her name crossed his mind, though not spoken by his lips, he was shaken by a sudden passion of love and desire; he recalled her proud, pale beauty, the blue of her eyes, "blue as the violets of his own Novgorod," the golden sheen of her hair, her lissom figure, and her cold haughty smile. He _would_ win her, or he would die; and what mattered any other woman's life if he could but appear worthy in her eyes? What had the chief said? "You must use a woman's weapons--_finesse_, deceit, distrust--when you make war upon a woman." Well, and so he would; it should go hard with him if he could not fit himself out in a woman's armour, and not reveal where the breast-plate failed to meet, or the helmet bound his forehead too tightly. One must put up with such little inconveniences when one adapts oneself to the warfare of the weaker sex. "Above all, distrust the women of the great world, they are our cleverest enemies;" that had been another of Patouchki's axioms; and he did distrust this pale, dark-eyed, slight American girl with every fibre of his mind, and read her through and through; her shallow cleverness, her dwarfed ambitions, her stunted love, that was not so much love as a mixture of baffled pride and jealousy, and desire of conquest. She could be useful to him; he had decided that within the dinner-hour, when he caught her suspicious glances, cast first at Philip Tremain, as he sat on Mrs. Newbold's left, and then at Miss Hildreth, who, radiant and handsome, was eating olives, and mystifying George Newbold, on whose right hand she was placed. He had read Miss James's secret then and there, and resolved that it should be useful to him, and that she should be the tool in his master-hand wherewith to work.