The strange bitterness of her tone, though it was low enough, and something wild, suffering, and revengeful in her look, though but momentary, and hardly definable, did not escape Lord Chelford, and he followed unconsciously the direction of her glance; but there was nothing there to guide him to a conclusion, and the good people who formed that polite and animated mob were in his eyes, one and all, quite below the level of tragedy, or even of melodrama. 'And yet, Miss Lake, we are all more or less cowards or deceivers--at least, to the extent of suppression. Who would speak the whole truth, or like to hear it?--not I, I know.' 'Nor I,' she said, quietly. 'And I do think, if people had no reserves, they would be very uninteresting,' he added. She was looking, with a strange light upon her face--a smile, perhaps--upon the open pages of 'Moore's Melodies' as he spoke. 'I like a little puzzle and mystery--they surround our future and our past; and the present would be insipid, I think, without them. Now, I can't tell, Miss Lake, as you look on Tom Moore there, and I try to read your smile, whether you happen at this particular moment to adore or despise him.' 'Moore's is a daring morality--what do you think, for instance, of these lines?' she said, touching the verse with her bouquet. Lord Chelford read-- I ask not, I know not, if guilt's in thy heart I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.' He laughed. 'Very passionate, but hardly respectable. I once knew,' he continued a little more gravely, 'a marriage made upon that principle, and not very audaciously either, which turned out very unhappily.' 'So I should conjecture,' she said, rising from her chair, rather drearily and abstractedly, 'and there is good old Lady Sarah. I must go and ask her how she does.' She paused for a moment, holding her bouquet drooping towards the floor, and looking with her clouded eyes down--down--through it; and then she looked up suddenly, with an odd, fierce smile, and she said bitterly enough--'and yet, if I were a man, and capable of loving, I could love no other way; because I suppose love to be a madness, and the sublimest and the most despicable of states. And I admire Moore for that flash of the fallen angelic--it is the sentiment of a hero and a madman--too base and too _noble_ for this cool, wise world.' She was already moving away, nebulous in hovering folds of snowy muslin. And she floated down like a cloud upon the ottoman, beside old Lady Sarah, and smiled and leaned towards her, and talked in her sweet, low, distinct accents. And Lord Chelford followed her, with a sad sort of smile, admiring her greatly.