But she knew that her hand was a difficult one to lead from, though she also knew that she held the great trumps—­unusual beauty, practically unlimited wealth, and considerable fascination of manner.  Her part must be to attract without repelling, charm without alarming, fascinate by slow degrees, till at length he was involved in a net from which there was no escape, and, above all, never to allow him to suspect her motives till the ripe moment came.  It was a hard task for a proud woman to set herself, and, in a manner, she was proud; but, alas, with the best of us, when love comes in at the door, pride, reason, and sometimes honour, fly out the window.

And so Miss Terry heard no more talk of the Isle of Wight.

Thenceforward, under the frank and open guise of friendship, Mildred contrived to keep Arthur continually at her side.  She did more.  She drew from him all the history of his engagement to Angela, and listened, with words of sympathy on her lips, and wrath and bitter jealousy in her heart, to his enraptured descriptions of her rival’s beauty and perfections.  So benighted was he, indeed, that once he went so far as to suggest that he should, when he and Angela were married, come to Madeira to spend their honeymoon, and dilated on the pleasant trips which they three might take together.

“Truly,” thought Mildred to herself, “that would be delightful.”  Once, too, he even showed her a tress of Angela’s hair, and, strange to say, she found that there still lingered in her bosom a sufficient measure of vulgar first principles to cause her to long to snatch it from him and throw it into the sea.  But, as it was, she smiled faintly, and admired openly, and then went to the glass to look at her own nut-brown tresses.  Never had she been so dissatisfied with them, and yet her hair was considered lovely, and an aesthetic hair-dresser had once called it a “poem.”

“Blind fool,” she muttered, stamping her little foot upon the floor, “why does he torture me so?”

Mildred forgot that all love is blind, and that none was ever blinder or more headstrong than her own.

And so this second Calypso of a lovely isle set herself almost as unblushingly as her prototype to get our very unheroic Ulysses into her toils.  And Penelope, poor Penelope, she sat at home and span, and defied her would-be lovers.

But as yet Ulysses—­I mean Arthur—­was conscious of none of those things.  He was by nature an easy-going young gentleman, who took matters as he found them, and asked no questions.  And he found them very pleasant at Madeira, or, rather, at the Quinta Carr, for he did everything except sleep there.  Within its precincts he was everywhere surrounded with that atmosphere of subtle and refined flattery, flattery addressed chiefly to the intellect, that is one of the most effective weapons of a clever woman.  Soon the drawing-room tables were loaded with his favourite books, and no songs but such as he approved were ordered from London.