"Why shouldn't I love my love?
Why shouldn't he love me?
Why shouldn't he come after me,
Since love to all is free?"
Beneath his window she pauses, and, finally, running up the steps of the balcony, peers in, full of an idle curiosity.
Sir Guy's den is the most desirable room in the house,—the coziest, the oddest, the most interesting. Looking at it, one guesses instinctively how addicted to all pretty things the owner is, from women down to less costly bijouterie.
Lovely landscapes adorn the walls side by side with Greuze-like faces, angelic in expression, unlike in appearance. There are a few portraits of beauties well known in the London and Paris worlds, frail as they are fair, false as they are piquante, whose garments (to do him justice) are distinctly decent, perhaps more so than their characters. But then indecency has gone out of fashion.
There are two or three lounges, some priceless statuettes, a few bits of bric-a-brac worth their weight in gold, innumerable yellow-backed volumes by Paul de Kock and his fellows, chairs of all shapes and sizes, one more comfortable and inviting than the other, enough meerschaum pipes and cigarette-holders and tobacco-stands to stock a small shop, a couple of dogs snoozing peacefully upon the hearth-rug, under the mistaken impression that a fire is burning in the grate, a writing-table, and before it Sir Guy. These are the principal things that attract Lilian's attention, as she gazes in, with her silken hair streaming behind her in the light breeze.
On the wall she cannot see, there are a few hunters by Herring, a copy of Millais' "Yes or No," a good deal of stable-ware, and beneath them, on a table, more pipes, cheroots, and boxes of cigars, mixed up with straw-covered bottles of perfume, thrust rather ignominiously into the corner.
A shadow falling across the paper on which he is writing, Guy raises his head, to see a fairy vision staring in at him,—a little slight figure, clothed in airy black with daintiest lace frillings at the throat and wrists, and with a wealth of golden hair brought purposely all over her face, letting only the laughing sapphire eyes, blue as the skies above her, gleam out from among it.