hateful fact, but we must face
the fact, that snobbishness was one of the springs to the tragedy here
chronicled.

We may set to this crowd's credit that it refrained now from following
Zuleika. Not one of the ladies present was deserted by her escort. All
the men recognised the Duke's right to be alone with Zuleika now. We may
set also to their credit that they carefully guarded the ladies from all
knowledge of what was afoot.

Side by side, the great lover and his beloved wandered away, beyond the
light of the Japanese lanterns, and came to Salt Cellar.

The moon, like a gardenia in the night's button-hole--but no! why should
a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to
something else--usually something to which she bears not the faintest
resemblance?... The moon, looking like nothing whatsoever but herself,
was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly
on the sun-dial at the centre of the lawn. Never, except once, late one
night in the eighteenth century, when the toper who was Sub-Warden had
spent an hour in trying to set his watch here, had she received the
slightest encouragement. Still she wanly persisted. And this was the
more absurd in her because Salt Cellar offered very good scope for those
legitimate effects of hers which we one and all admire. Was it nothing
to her to have cut those black shadows across the cloisters? Was
it nothing to her that she so magically mingled her rays with the
candle-light shed forth from Zuleika's bedroom? Nothing, that she
had cleansed the lawn of all its colour, and made of it a platform of
silver-grey, fit for fairies to dance on?

If Zuleika, as she paced the gravel path, had seen how transfigured--how
nobly like the Tragic Muse--she was just now, she could not have gone on
bothering the Duke for a keepsake of the tragedy that was to be.

She was still set on having his two studs. He was still firm in his
refusal to misappropriate those heirlooms. In vain she pointed out to
him that the pearls he meant, the white ones, no longer existed; that
the pearls he was wearing were no more "entailed" than if he had got
them yesterday. "And you actually DID get them yesterday," she said.
"And from me. And I want them back."

"You are ingenious," he admitted. "I, in my simple way, am but head of
the Tanville-Tankerton family. Had you accepted my offer of marriage,
you would have had the right to wear these two pearls during your
lif