he
black eyes were heavy with the lust of conquest, the points of the mouth
turned up more sharply than usual; there was an insatiable vanity in the
commanding poise of her head. She was as little like the woman of the
morning as the sun is like the midnight, and Isabel experienced a
positive terror of her.

Feeling sixteen and very foolish, she sank to the edge of a chair and
muttered something about the charm of the room. Then, as Lady Victoria,
who had arranged herself among the shining pillows, continued to stare
at her with absolutely no change of expression, it dawned upon her that
she had not been expected but that some one else was. With too little
presence of mind left to retire gracefully and too much pride to appear
to have ventured into the cave of Venus unasked, she managed to
articulate her gratitude for the invitation of the morning.

"Oh!" Lady Victoria's eyebrows expressed a flicker of intelligence. "I
hope you have managed not to bore yourself."

Isabel plunged into an account of her drive, to which Lady Victoria, who
had lit a long Russian cigarette, paid no attention whatever. Her
expression was still petrified, except that she might have had the scent
of blood in her slightly dilating nostrils.

Suddenly the slow flame in her eyes burned upward, and Isabel, her head
fairly jerking about, saw that a man had entered and was advancing
rapidly across the room, his heavy eyes wide with admiration. It was the
Frenchman whom Lady Victoria had honored with so much of her attention
the evening before.

He raised to his lips the pointed fingers negligently extended, and
murmured something to which Lady Victoria replied in French as pure and
fluent as his own; and in a low rich voice, with not an echo in it of
her habitual abruptness or haughty languor.

The Frenchman accepted a cigarette and a low chair opposite the divan,
whose golden cushions seemed subtly to embrace the yielding flexible
figure against them. Neither took the slightest notice of the third
person beyond a muttered introduction and acknowledgment, and as the man
embarked on a soft torrent of speech, bearing the burden of his
beatitude in at last meeting the only Englishwoman whose fame in Paris
was as great as among her native fogs, Isabel rose and retreated with
what dignity she could summon. Then Lady Victoria, seeing that she was
rid of her, and courteous under all her idiosyncrasies, rose with a long
motion of repressed energy and