’How delightful.  I have always longed to live among a slave population, dear submissive black things dressed in coral necklaces and feathers, instead of the horrid over-fed wretches we have to wait upon us.  And if the aborigines were not wanted it was just as well for them to die out, don’t you know,’ prattled Lady Kirkbank.

’It was very accommodating of them, no doubt.  Yet we could employ half a million of them, if we had them, in draining our swamps.  Agriculture suffered by the loss of Indian labour.’

’I suppose they were like the creatures in Pizarro, poor dear yellow things with brass bracelets,’ said Lady Kirkbank.  ’I remember seeing Macready as Rolla when I was quite a little thing.’

And now the curtain rose for the last act.

‘Do you care about staying for the end?’ asked Mr. Smithson of Lesbia.  ‘It will make us rather late at the Orleans.’

‘Never mind how late we are,’ said Lesbia, imperiously.  ’I have always been cheated out of this last act for some stupid party.  Imagine losing Gounod and Nillson for the sake of struggling through the mob on a stifling staircase, and being elbowed by inane young men, with gardenias in their coats.’

Lady Lesbia had a pretty little way of always opposing any suggestion of her sweetheart.  She was resolved to treat him as badly as a future husband could be treated.  In consenting to marry him she had done him a favour which was a great deal more than such a person had any right to expect.

She leant forward to watch and listen, with her elbow resting on the velvet cushion—­her head upon her hand, and she seemed absorbed in the scene.  But this was mere outward seeming.  All the enchantment of music and acting was over.  She only heard and saw vaguely, as if it were a shadowy scene enacted ever so far away.  Every now and then her eyes glanced involuntarily toward Don Gomez, who stood leaning against the back of the box, pale, languid, graceful, poetic, an altogether different type of manhood from that with which she had of late been satiated.

Those deep dark eyes of his had a dreamy look.  They gazed across the dazzling house, into space, above Lady Lesbia’s head.  They seemed to see nothing; and they certainly were not looking at her.

Don Gomez was the first man she ever remembered to have been presented to her who did not favour her with a good deal of hard staring, more or less discreetly managed, during the first ten minutes of their acquaintance.  On him her beauty fell flat.  He evidently failed to recognise her supreme loveliness.  It might be that she was the wrong type for Cuba.  Every nation has its own Venus; and that far away spot beyond the torrid zone might have a somewhat barbarous idea of beauty.  At any rate, Don Gomez was apparently unimpressed.  And yet Lesbia flattered herself that she was looking her best to-night, and that her costume was a success.  She wore a white satin gown, short in the skirt, for the luxury of freedom in waltzing, and made with Quaker-like simplicity, the bodice high to the throat, fitting her like a sheath.