Releasing her grip of the draperies hanging by the window, the proud and insolent beauty began walking up and down the room, flinging away the paper from which she had been studying. She looked like some handsome tigress, cramped up in a gilded cage, as she paced to and fro, her dress trailing along the carpet in rich and massive folds. Some almost ungovernable fit of passion appeared to have seized upon her, and she gave way to her impulses as a hot, undisciplined nature might yield. There was a strange kind of contrast between the feline grace of her movements, the faultless elegance of her perfect toilet, the splendor of her beauty, and the untutored violence of her manner. “What do they want here?” she asked, half-aloud. “Why do they come here, plotting under my windows? Do they defy me? Do they hope to crush me? What has Paul Desfrayne to complain of? I defy him, as I do Leonardo Gilardoni! Let them do their worst! What are they going to do? Has Leonardo Gilardoni found any--any----” She started back and looked round with a guilty terror, as if she dared not think out the half-spoken surmise even to herself. “He knows nothing--he can know nothing; and he has no longer any hold on me,” she muttered presently; “unless--unless the other has told him; and I don’t believe he would trust a fellow like _him_: for Paul Desfrayne is as proud as Lucifer. Oh, if I could but live my life over again! What mistakes--what fatal mistakes I have made--mistakes which may yet bring ruin as their fruit! I will leave England to-morrow. I don’t care what they say, or think, or what loss it may cost to myself or any one else. Yet, am I safer elsewhere? I know not. What would be the consequences if they could prove I had done what I have done? I know not; I have never had the courage to ask.” Totally unconscious of the vicinity of this beautiful, vindictive woman, Captain Desfrayne tranquilly passed into the house which he had come to visit. “Can I see Mrs. Desfrayne?” he inquired of the smart maid servant who answered his summons. “I will see, sir. She was at dinner, sir, and I don’t think she has gone out yet.” The beribboned and pretty girl, throwing open the door of a room at hand, and ushering the visitor within, left him alone, while she flitted off in search of the lady for whom he had asked, not, however, without taking a sidelong glance at his handsome face before she disappeared. The apartment was a long dining-room, extending from the front to the back of the house, furnished amply, yet with a certain richness, the articles being all of old oak, carved elaborately, which lent a somber, somewhat stately effect. It was obviously, however, a room in a semifashionable boarding-house. In a few minutes a lady opened the door, and entered with the joyous eagerness of a girl.