“Why, Mr. Lyddon,” she said, in a surprised voice, “Madame Le Noir is very, very pretty, but I shouldn’t call her beautiful!”
“My child, men will always call Madame Le Noir beautiful because she is seductive; that is beauty of the highest order.”
Angela laughed.
“I didn’t think you were so keen on beauty, Mr. Lyddon.”
“I’m not; I let the ladies alone as severely as they let me alone, but I know a beautiful woman when I see one. This Madame Le Noir has the beauty of the serpent of old Nile. I dare say there will be a match between her and Captain Isabey soon.”
“Why do you think so?” asked in a tremulous voice the wife of Neville Tremaine.
“It is what the ladies call intuition. They were not brought up together at all as brother and sister; that much I know from Captain Isabey, who mentioned that he was at the university when his father’s second marriage occurred.”
Angela sat silent revolving these things in her mind.
Isabey married! She had thought of him for years as a hero of romance, a knight of dreams, but she had never contemplated him as married.
Lyddon continued: