“Baby!” cries Zai, in amazement. “And yet I ought not to be surprised, for I might have read the news in Lord Delaval’s face when he looked up from beside her at tea last night. I expect he likes embarrass des richesses, and is angry that even one of his worshippers should secede from her homage.”
“It is no reason, because Baby gives her fat, dimpled hand to old Hamilton, that she should consider it necessary to close her heart to the fascination of her quasi lover!” says Gabrielle, with her Balzacian ideas, ideas that find no response in the pure mind of Zai.
“I can’t stay chattering any longer, Gabrielle,” she says hurriedly, and in the twinkling of an eye she is gone; and, as Gabrielle looks up surprised at her summary departure, she sees the tall figure of Lord Delaval slowly crossing the lawn towards the house, and guesses at once why Zai has disappeared in such haste. She bends forward, and, with wildly beating heart and tightly clenched hands, eagerly watches him.
Everyone who knew Gabrielle, sooner or later, asked themselves if she had a heart; and nobody amongst those most intimate with her, had yet been able to answer the question at all satisfactorily, excepting Lord Delaval.
But he did not seem to deem it worth his while to study her at all, though indirectly, and at all favourable opportunities, he let her be fully aware through the medium of his handsome eyes and his voice that he knew she had a heart, and that it was one he read like an open book and found remarkably interesting.
According to Dickens, there are chords in the human heart—strange varying strings which are only struck by accident, which will remain mute and senseless to appeals the most passionate and earnest, and respond at last to the slightest casual touch.
And so it is with Gabrielle.
She has reached over a quarter of a century.
Her nature is as passionate as that of a daughter of the south, and her early nurturing has been as wild and free as an Arab’s; but no man’s hand had struck the keynote of feeling until Lord Delaval put in an appearance on the scene.
He came, he saw, he conquered; and Gabrielle fell down at once, helplessly and hopelessly, to worship him.