ormer, excuse me: I don't live in the nineteenth century.
_Jamais de la vie_!" the gentleman declared.

"Nor in London either?"

"Yes--when I'm not at Samarcand! But surely we've diverged since the old
days. I adore what you burn, you burn what I adore." While the stranger
spoke he looked cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not because it was
she, she easily guessed, but because it was in his nature to desire a
second auditor--a kind of sympathetic gallery. Her life was somehow
filled with shy people, and she immediately knew she had never
encountered any one who seemed so to know his part and recognise his
cues.

"How do you know what I adore?" Nicholas Dormer asked.

"I know well enough what you used to."

"That's more than I do myself. There were so many things."

"Yes, there are many things--many, many: that's what makes life so
amusing."

"Do you find it amusing?"

"My dear fellow, _c'est a se tordre_. Don't you think so? Ah it was high
time I should meet you--I see. I've an idea you need me."

"Upon my word I think I do!" Nick said in a tone which struck his sister
and made her wonder still more why, if the gentleman was so important as
that, he didn't introduce him.

"There are many gods and this is one of their temples," the mysterious
personage went on. "It's a house of strange idols--isn't it?--and of
some strange and unnatural sacrifices."

To Biddy as much as to her brother this remark might have been offered;
but the girl's eyes turned back to the ladies who for the moment had
lost their companion. She felt irresponsive and feared she should pass
with this easy cosmopolite for a stiff, scared, English girl, which was
not the type she aimed at; but wasn't even ocular commerce overbold so
long as she hadn't a sign from Nick? The elder of the strange women had
turned her back and was looking at some bronze figure, losing her shawl
again as she did so; but the other stood where their escort had quitted
her, giving all her attention to his sudden sociability with others. Her
arms hung at her sides, her head was bent, her face lowered, so that she
had an odd appearance of raising her eyes from under her brows; and in
this attitude she was striking, though her air was so unconciliatory as
almost to seem dangerous. Did it express resentment at having been
abandoned for another girl? Biddy, who began to be frightened--there was
a moment when the neglected creature resembled a tigress about to
spring--was