Mme. Lorraine, at his side, watched him with lowered lids and compressed lips. At last, tapping his arm with her fan, and smiling archly, she said, in an under-tone: "Beautiful, is she not, _mon ami_? But--that is all. Her mind is a void, a blank--capable of nothing but the emotions of anger or hatred, the same as the brute creation. I have tried to educate her into a companion, but in vain; so she can never be more than a pretty toy to me--no more nor less than my Maltese kitten or my Spitz puppy, although I like to see her about me, the same as I love all beautiful things." He heard her in amazement. Soulless--that beautiful, spirited-looking creature! Could it be? He saw the dark eyes lighten as the men began to praise her dauntless riding that day. They were very expressive, those large, almond-shaped eyes. Surely a soul dwelt behind those dark-fringed lids. Some one proposed cards, and madame assented with alacrity, without seeing Eliot Van Zandt's gesture of disgust. He refused point-blank to take a hand in the game, and said, with reckless audacity: "Do not mind me; I am always unlucky at play; so I will amuse myself instead with Little Nobody." Her eyes flashed, but when Mme. Lorraine vacated the seat upon the sofa, she came over and took it, not with any appearance of forwardness, but as a simple matter of course. Then, looking up at him, she said, with child-like directness: "And so you are a Yankee? I am surprised. I have always hated the Yankees, you know. My father was a Confederate soldier, madame says. He was killed the last year of the war, just a month before I was born." Mme. Lorraine looked around with a dark frown, but Van Zandt pretended not to see it as he answered: "Do you mean that you will not have me for your friend, ma'amselle, because I was born in Boston, and because my father fell fighting for the Stars and Stripes?" "A friend? What is that, monsieur?" she queried, naïvely; and Markham, to whom the conversation was perfectly audible from his corner of the card-table, looked around, and said, teasingly: "It is something that you will never be able to keep, ma'amselle, by reason of your pretty face. All your friends will become your lovers." "Hold your tongue, Colonel Markham; I was not talking to you, and it's ill manners to break into a conversation," said the girl, shortly. She broke off a white camellia from a vase near her, and held it lightly between her taper fingers as she again addressed herself to the journalist: "I like your word 'friend.' It has a nice sound. But I don't quite understand." "I must try to explain it to you," he replied, smiling. "I may tell you, since Markham has broached the subject, that the poets have said that friendship is love in disguise, but the dictionary gives it a more prosaic meaning. Let us find it as it is in Webster." "Webster?" stammeringly, and Mme. Lorraine looked around with her disagreeably sarcastic laugh.