“Do? Why—
‘To go and hang yourselves, for being yourselves.’ ”
quoths Zai flippantly, as she moves towards the house.
Suddenly she pauses, she cannot go in just now into the crowded ball-room and look with calmness on her faithless—faithless lover.
Ah! how unutterably wretched she is. She feels as if life were over for her, now that Carl is going to marry Miss Meredyth.
“I have got such a headache,” she says wearily (she might say heartache), “and if I go into that suffocating room, it will be worse. Then to-morrow I shall make my appearance at breakfast with great haggard eyes, red-rimmed and underlined with bistre shades, and a horrid white face that will draw down such a scolding from mamma and Trixy! You know well enough all I shall have to endure.”
The trivial bond of sympathy which her stress on the “you” seems to indicate sounds strangely pleasant to his ears, but he preserves a silence, though he gazes at her fixedly.
For, under the flickering light, Zai is truly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
“Lord Delaval, will you do me a very great favour?” she pleads prettily, glancing up at him.
“Of course!” he answers rather dreamily. He is a Society man, a scoffer at sentiment, an Atheist in love, but this little girl’s ways and proximity exercise a curious influence over him. They are in fact something like the opium trance, of which De Quincey gives so wonderful a description in the “Suspiria.”