‘There are no nightingales after June.  There is the Manola,’ as the band struck up, ‘my very favourite waltz.’

Don Gomez was at her elbow at this moment

‘May I have the honour of this waltz with you, Lady Lesbia?’ he asked; and then with a serio-comic glance at his stoutish friend, ’I don’t think Smithson waltzes?’

’I have been told that nobody can waltz who has been born on this side of the Pyrenees,’ answered Lesbia, withdrawing her arm from her lover’s, and slipping, it through the Spaniard’s, with the air of a slave who obeys a master.

Smithson looked daggers, and retired to a corner of the room glowering.  Were a man twenty-two times millionaire, like the Parisian Rothschild, he could not find armour against the poisoned arrows of jealousy.  Don Gomez possessed many of those accomplishments which make men dangerous, but as a dancer he was hors ligne; and Horace Smithson knew that there is no surer road to a girl’s fancy than the magic circle of a waltz.

Those two were floating round the room in the old slow legato step, which recalled to Smithson the picture of a still more spacious room in an island under the Southern Cross—­the blue water of the bay shining yonder under the starlight of the tropics, fire-flies gleaming and flashing in the foliage beyond the open windows, fire-flies flashing amidst the gauzy draperies of the dancers, and this same Gomez revolving with the same slow languid grace, his arm encircling the svelte figure of a woman whose southern beauty outshone Lesbia’s blonde English loveliness as the tropical stars outshine the lamps that light our colder skies.  Yes, every detail of the scene flashed back into his mind, as if a curtain had been suddenly plucked back from a long-hidden picture.  The Cuban’s tall slim figure, the head gently bent towards his partner’s head, as at this moment, and those dark eyes looking up at him, intoxicated with that nameless, indefinable fascination which it is the lot of some men to exercise.

‘He robbed me of her!’ thought Smithson, gloomily.  ’Will he rob me of this one too?  Surely not!  Havana is Havana—­and this one is not a Creole.  If I cannot trust that lovely piece of marble, there is no woman on earth to be trusted.’

He turned his back upon the dancers, and went out into the garden.  His soul was wrung with jealousy, yet he could watch no longer.  There was too much pain—­there were too many bitter memories of shame, and loss, and ignominy evoked by that infernal picture.  If he had been free he would have asserted his authority as Lesbia’s future husband; he would have taken her away from the Orleans; he would have told her plainly and frankly that Don Gomez was no fit person for her to know; and he would have so planned that they two should never meet again.  But Horace Smithson was not free.  He was bound hand and foot by those fetters which the chain of past events had forged—­stern facts which