“Really, Lord Delaval, if Lady Beranger heard you she would drop at such a breach of the convenances.”
“Possibly,” he answers coolly, “but hang the convenances. Don’t you know that there are times in every fellow’s life when he comes into collision with the conventionalities, and either breaks them, or else risks being broken by keeping them? So long as I can run with my Juggurnauth, alias ‘Society,’ I am content, but I cannot throw myself before it and get mangled. Do you know I rather fancied I had a chance of finding you alone here, and so I determined to make chance a certainty?”
Gabrielle gives him a quick glance of surprise, while her heart throbs faster than it has ever done before in the six-and-twenty years she has lived.
Lord Delaval has often looked love at her—hinted at love, but he has never gone as far as this.
She has met him by appointment once or twice; still, nothing has been said to make her believe he really cared for her.
Now she reddens like a rose, and feels a nervous tremor run through her, and yet his manner is scarcely like a lover’s. There is, in fact, nothing in what he says that could not pass as the ordinary talk of Society, yet the conversation seems lifted out from an ordinary atmosphere. They two, Lord Delaval and herself, are alone, and he talks to her just as if they were disembodied spirits. There are men occasionally in this world who have the power of bringing a woman they approach into direct contact with their own natures. They have a special gift of penetration, and one feels that in whatever relation one meets them, it is sustained by one’s real self towards an equally real individuality on the other side.
Lord Delaval always makes Gabrielle feel this, and his intense manner adds to the feeling, but, with the supreme wilfulness of her nature, she refuses to yield to the magnetic influence he has over her without, at any rate, a struggle.
“You can have nothing to say to me, Lord Delaval, that all the world and the world’s wife cannot hear. Are you mistaking me by chance for Zai?” she asks, carelessly, but she has no control over her features, and the excitement of his presence lends them a flashing, bewildering beauty, that positively dazzles him—pro tem.!
He fixes his deep blue eyes on her with an expression of fervid admiration, and her lids fall beneath the passion of his glance, but she lifts them bravely, and meets his gaze full.
“You really look as if you thought I did not mean what I say!”