She rose, and the antique book “Of Delusions” fell to the floor. Her slim figure, loosely draped in the folds of crimson silk and white fur, looked wonderfully graceful and well-poised, and had there been a mirror in the sitting-room, as there was in the bedroom, she might possibly have seen something in her appearance worthy of even men’s admiration. But her thoughts were far away from herself,--she had before her eyes the picture of her old lover grown slightly broader and heavier in build, with ugly furrows of commonplace care engraven on his once smooth and handsome face,--“hen-pecked” probably by his stout better-half and submitting to this frequently inevitable fate with a more or less ill grace, and again she laughed,--a laugh of purest unforced merriment. “Here I am, like Hamlet, ‘exceeding proud and revengeful,’ and after all I ought to be devoutly thankful!” she said. “For, if I analyse myself honestly, I do not really consider I have lost anything in losing a man who would certainly have been an unfaithful husband. What I _do_ feel is the slight on myself! That he should have callously allowed me to wait all those years for him, and _then_--have cast me aside like an old shoe, is an injury which I think I may justly resent--and which,--if I ever get the chance--I may punish!” Here her brows clouded, and she sighed. “What an impossible idea! I talk as if I were young, with all the world before me!--and with power to realise my dreams!--when really everything of that sort is over for me, and I have only to see how I can best live out the remainder of life!” Then like a faint whisper stealing through the silence, came the words which Dimitrius had spoken on the first night of her arrival--that night when the moonlight had drenched the garden in a shower of pearl and silver,--“_What would you give to be young?_” A thrill ran through her nerves as though they had been played upon by an electric vibration. Had Dimitrius any such secret as that which he hinted at?--or was he only deluding himself, and was his brain, by over much study, slipping off the balance? She had heard of the wisest scientists who, after astonishing the world by the brilliancy of their researches and discoveries, had suddenly sunk from their lofty pinnacles of attained knowledge to the depth of consulting “mediums,” who pretended to bring back the spirits of the dead that they might converse with their relatives and friends in bad grammar and worse logic,--might not Dimitrius be just as unfortunate in his own special “scientific” line?