As she almost whispers this, her conscience is troubled with a compunctious throb, her glance seeks the tiny, almost invisible, chain to which the locket containing Carl’s picture is attached, and out of the cloistered greenness and dimness Carl Conway’s handsome face seems to look at her reproachfully for denying her love for him.
“So glad to hear you speak like this!” Lord Delaval murmurs quite tenderly, and he slightly presses against him the little hand lying so snow-white on his arm, “especially as a little bird has told me something.”
“What has it told you?” Zai asks carelessly, while her eyes follow the two figures of her evidently inconstant lover and his companion, with a pathos and wistfulness in their depths that the dusk luckily hides from Lord Delaval.
“It told me that Conway is going to marry Miss Meredyth.”
For half an instant Zai forgets her Belgravian training. Under the Chinese lanterns her cheeks grow white as death, and there is an unmistakable tremor in her voice as she says:
“Are they engaged? But it is not possible!” she adds more slowly.
“Why isn’t it possible?” asks Lord Delaval, rousing out of languor into a suspicious condition. “Is it because he has been trying to make you believe that Miss Meredyth’s bank stock and horses and diamonds are of no importance in his opinion?”
“Miss Meredyth’s money,” Zai says in a low voice. “I—I did not know she was very rich!” Then she cries impetuously:
“How contemptible it is for a man to be mercenary.”
“Some men cannot help being so,” he replies quietly. “For instance, what can fellows like Conway, who have no substantial means at all, do?”