Mr. Tremain coming suddenly--from the artificiality of the miniature La Scala, with its rose-coloured hangings, its wax tapers, its atmosphere laden with the manufactured perfumes of chypre, jockey-club, duchesse; and its stage, on which the mimic actors travestied the passions of real life; its audience, made up of fair women, whose costly robes were more priceless in their eyes than the ruder virtues of truth and honour; of men, whose natural abilities were buried beneath a fashionable languor, and whose moral nature was stunted and undeveloped by the blighting curse of their century, love of gold and desire of its possession--into the immensity and candour of the night--felt as if dealt a blow, and stopped involuntarily, swayed by some unknown emotion that strove against the one influence and yearned towards the other. He stepped down from the terrace, and wandered aimlessly along the broad garden paths, his hands clasped loosely behind him, his bare head bent forward, the April wind stirring the short brown locks that fell over his forehead. Now and then he stooped down and looked carefully at some half-hidden blossom, drawing back the leaves with heedful fingers, and smiling at his own childishness as he passed on, not rifling even one bud from the parent stem. The garden paths were all broad and straight, and Philip walked on, unheeding his steps and unmindful of his course. He was very deep in thought, so deep that presently he forgot to notice the flowers on either side, passing on without halting at any favoured one. Dick Darling's bald news--that Mdlle. Lamien had left the Folly--and her apparent ignorance as to her return, had opened Philip's eyes with a start, and revealed to him the distance he had already travelled in the primrose path of dalliance and uncertainty. He acknowledged to himself, with a twinge of mortification, that her leaving the house in such a manner, and without any word to him as to her intention, was a wound to his self-love and self-esteem. Though, indeed, why Mdlle. Lamien should have confided her plans to him was an open question. He had met her but once face to face since the accident, and that opportunity had resolved itself into the unsatisfactory interview in the corridor, when she had scorned his hand, and swept by him down the stairs without a word. Poor Philip! it was rather rough treatment, as he said to himself, to have his hand refused twice in the same evening by two different women! A smile of self-scorn and amusement came to his lips as he recalled the incident; fate was not usually so unkind, he was not accustomed to such churlish treatment at her hands, and the very novelty set him speculating as to the motives that incited two such opposite natures to a similarity of action.