way to the East? When you came back two years later you had not
forgotten me."

She looked divinely pretty as she stood there in the moonlight, with the
fur-cloak sliding off her beautiful shoulders, the gold embroidery on
her dress shimmering around her, her childlike blue eyes turned up fully
at him.

He stood for a moment, rigid and still, but for the clenching of his
hand against the stone balustrade of the terrace.

"You desired my presence, Madame," he said frigidly. "I take it that it
was not with the view to indulging in tender reminiscences."

His voice certainly was cold and uncompromising: his attitude before
her, stiff and unbending. Womanly decorum would have suggested
Marguerite should return coldness for coldness, and should sweep past
him without another word, only with a curt nod of her head: but womanly
instinct suggested that she should remain--that keen instinct, which
makes a beautiful woman conscious of her powers long to bring to her
knees the one man who pays her no homage. She stretched out her hand to
him.

"Nay, Sir Percy, why not? the present is not so glorious but that I
should not wish to dwell a little in the past."

He bent his tall figure, and taking hold of the extreme tip of the
fingers which she still held out to him, he kissed them ceremoniously.

"I' faith, Madame," he said, "then you will pardon me, if my dull wits
cannot accompany you there."

Once again he attempted to go, once more her voice, sweet, childlike,
almost tender, called him back.

"Sir Percy."

"Your servant, Madame."

"Is it possible that love can die?" she said with sudden, unreasoning
vehemence. "Methought that the passion which you once felt for me would
outlast the span of human life. Is there nothing left of that
love, Percy . . . which might help you . . . to bridge over that sad
estrangement?"

His massive figure seemed, while she spoke thus to him, to stiffen still
more, the strong mouth hardened, a look of relentless obstinacy crept
into the habitually lazy blue eyes.

"With what object, I pray you, Madame?" he asked coldly.

"I do not understand you."

"Yet 'tis simple enough," he said with sudden bitterness, which seemed
literally to surge through his words, though he was making visible
efforts to suppress it, "I humbly put the question to you, for my slow
wits are unable to grasp the cause of this, your ladyship's sudden new
mood. Is it that you have the taste to renew the devilish s