and the rubies men saw on her. At last, here was the youth who would not
bow down to her; whom, looking up to him, she could adore. She ate and
drank automatically, never taking her gaze from him. She felt not one
touch of pique at his behaviour. She was tremulous with a joy that was
new to her, greater than any joy she had known. Her soul was as a flower
in its opetide. She was in love. Rapt, she studied every lineament of
the pale and perfect face--the brow from which bronze-coloured hair rose
in tiers of burnished ripples; the large steel-coloured eyes, with their
carven lids; the carven nose, and the plastic lips. She noted how long
and slim were his fingers, and how slender his wrists. She noted the
glint cast by the candles upon his shirt-front. The two large white
pearls there seemed to her symbols of his nature. They were like two
moons: cold, remote, radiant. Even when she gazed at the Duke's face,
she was aware of them in her vision.

Nor was the Duke unconscious, as he seemed to be, of her scrutiny.
Though he kept his head averse, he knew that always her eyes were
watching him. Obliquely, he saw them; saw, too, the contour of the face,
and the black pearl and the pink; could not blind himself, try as he
would. And he knew that he was in love.

Like Zuleika herself, this young Duke was in love for the first time.
Wooed though he had been by almost as many maidens as she by youths, his
heart, like hers, had remained cold. But he had never felt, as she
had, the desire to love. He was not now rejoicing, as she was, in the
sensation of first love; nay, he was furiously mortified by it, and
struggled with all his might against it. He had always fancied himself
secure against any so vulgar peril; always fancied that by him at least,
the proud old motto of his family--"Pas si bete"--would not be belied.
And I daresay, indeed, that had he never met Zuleika, the irresistible,
he would have lived, and at a very ripe old age died, a dandy without
reproach. For in him the dandiacal temper had been absolute hitherto,
quite untainted and unruffled. He was too much concerned with his
own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else. Different from
Zuleika, he cared for his wardrobe and his toilet-table not as a means
to making others admire him the more, but merely as a means through
which he could intensify, a ritual in which to express and realise, his
own idolatry. At Eton he had been called "Peacock," and this nick