She crosses the lawn noiselessly, threads the shrubbery, and steals behind a clump of elms.
It is the identical spot where Zai had held her rose-coloured reverie this morning.
A few paces further on, with the elm branches drooping low as if to conceal them from view, but with the yellow rays of the setting sun falling on them, two heads, one close-cropped, the other crowned with ruddy chesnut, had been very near to one another, and these heads belonged to Zai and that “horrid actor fellow.”
Carl Conway’s arm had been round a slender waist, and Zai’s sweet face upturned so that a moustached lip might rest on her coral mouth; but when Lady Beranger sees these two culprits, they have said good-bye, and are a discreet distance from one another.
CHAPTER IV.
LORD DELAVAL.
“We played at Bondsman and at Queen,
But as the days change—men change too;
I find the grey seas’ notes of green,
The green seas’ fervent flakes of blue,
More fair than you.”
All the amber and purple and gold of the western sky has faded away, and only a faint rose glow lingers. The wind is dead, and soft and fragrant dusk lies like a mantle on the fair world, but the mantle of twilight is edged with the silver lustre of a tender young moon, and a shoal of inquisitive stars begin to peep at each other, when Gabrielle passes quickly upstairs and knocks at a door adjoining her own.
“Come in.”