"You will, you must, you shall!" I said ardently. "I will be your master in the art of loving!" "It is a difficult art!" she said--"I am afraid it will take a life-time to complete my training, even with my 'master.'" And a smile still lingered in her eyes, giving them a witch-like glamour, when I kissed her again and bade her good-night. "You will tell Prince Rimânez the news?" she said. "If you wish it." "Of course I wish it. Tell him at once. I should like him to know." I went down the stairs,--she leaned over the balustrade looking after me. "Good-night Geoffrey!" she called softly. "Good-night Sibyl!" "Be sure you tell Prince Rimânez!" Her white figure disappeared; and I walked out of the house in a chaotic state of mind, divided between pride, ecstasy and pain,--the engaged husband of an earl's daughter,--the lover of a woman who had declared herself incapable of love and destitute of faith. XVIII Looking back through the space of only three years to this particular period of my life, I can remember distinctly the singular expression of Lucio's face when I told him that Sibyl Elton had accepted me. His sudden smile gave a light to his eyes that I had never seen in them before,--a brilliant yet sinister glow, strangely suggestive of some inwardly suppressed wrath and scorn. While I spoke he was, to my vexation, toying with that uncanny favourite of his, the 'mummy-insect,'--and it annoyed me beyond measure to see the repulsive pertinacity with which the glittering bat-like creature clung to his hand. "Women are all alike,"--he said with a hard laugh, when he had heard my news,--"Few of them have moral force enough to resist that temptation of a rich marriage." I was irritated at this. "It is scarcely fair of you to judge everything by the money-standard,"--I said,--then, after a little pause I added what in my own heart I knew to be a lie,--"She,--Sibyl,--loves me for myself alone." His glance flashed over me like lightning. "Oh!--sets the wind in that quarter! Why then, my dear Geoffrey, I congratulate you more heartily than ever. To conquer the affections of one of the proudest girls in England, and win her love so completely as to be sure she would marry you even if you had not a sou to bless yourself with--this is a victory indeed!--and one of which you may well be proud. Again and yet again I congratulate you!" Tossing the horrible thing he called his 'sprite' off to fly on one of its slow humming circuits round the room, he shook my hand fervently, still smiling,--and I,--feeling instinctively that he was as fully aware of the truth as I was, namely, that had I been a poor author with nothing but what I could earn by my brains, the Lady Sibyl Elton would never have looked at me, much less agreed to marry me,--kept silence lest I should openly betray the reality of my position.