At a quarter before eight Francis Markrute went up to his niece's sitting-room. She was already dressed in a sapphire-blue velvet masterpiece of simplicity. The Tancred presents of sapphires and diamonds lay in their open cases on the table with the splendid Markrute yards of pearls. She was standing looking down at them, the strangest expression of cynical resignation upon her face. "Your gift is magnificent, Uncle Francis," she said, without thanking him. "Which do you wish me to wear? Yours--or his?" "Lord Tancred's, he has specially asked that you put his on to-night," the financier replied. "These are only his first small ones; the other jewels are being reset for you. Nothing can be kinder or more generous than the whole family has been. You see this brooch, with the large drop sapphire and diamond, is from the Duke." She inclined her head without enthusiasm, and took her own small pearls from her ears, and replaced them by the big sapphire and diamond earrings; a rivière of alternate solitaire sapphires and diamonds she clasped round her snowy throat. "You look absolutely beautiful," her uncle exclaimed with admiration. "I knew I could perfectly trust to your taste--the dress is perfection." "Then I suppose we shall have to go down," she said quietly. She was perfectly calm, her face expressionless; if there was a tempestuous suggestion in her somber eyes she generally kept the lids lowered. Inwardly, she felt a raging rebellion. This was the first ceremony of the sacrifice, and although in the abstract her fine senses appreciated the jewels and all her new and beautiful clothes and _apanages_, they in no way counterbalanced the hateful degradation. To her it was a hideous mockery--the whole thing; she was just a chattel, a part of a business bargain. She could not guess her uncle's motive for the transaction (he had a deep one, of course), but Lord Tancred's was plain and purely contemptible. Money! For had not the whole degrading thing been settled before he had ever seen her? He was worse than Ladislaus who, at all events, had been passionately in love, in his revolting, animal way. She knew nothing of the English customs, nor how such a thing as the arrangement of this marriage, as she thought it was, was a perfectly unknown impossibility, as an idea. She supposed that the entire family were aware of the circumstances, and were willing to accept her only for her uncle's wealth--she already hated and despised them all. Her idea was, "_noblesse oblige_," and that a great and ancient house should never stoop to such depths. Francis Markrute looked at her when she said, "I suppose we shall have to go down," with that icy calm. He felt faintly uneasy. "Zara, it is understood you will be gracious? and _brusquer_ no one?" But all the reply he received was a glance of scorn. She had given her word and refused to discuss that matter.