“The air is deliciously cool,” she said, “the moonlight peaceful and poetic, and the garden inviting. Will you not stay in it awhile; the hour is not yet late, or is my company so distasteful to you, that you are in a hurry to rid yourself of it?”

“Nay, Madame,” he rejoined placidly, “but ’tis on the other foot the shoe happens to be, and I’ll warrant you’ll find the midnight air more poetic without my company: no doubt the sooner I remove the obstruction the better your ladyship will like it.”

He turned once more to go.

“I protest you mistake me, Sir Percy,” she said hurriedly, and drawing a little closer to him; “the estrangement, which, alas! has arisen between us, was none of my making, remember.”

“Begad! you must pardon me there, Madame!” he protested coldly, “my memory was always of the shortest.”

He looked her straight in the eyes, with that lazy nonchalance which had become second nature to him. She returned his gaze for a moment, then her eyes softened, as she came up quite close to him, to the foot of the terrace steps.

“Of the shortest, Sir Percy! Faith! how it must have altered! Was it three years ago or four that you saw me for one hour in Paris, on your 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 a 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 that Marguerite should return coldness for coldness, and should sweep past him without another word, only with a curt nod of the 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.”