“The proud, little minx!  So she has insisted upon keeping to the business bargain up till now, has she!” he thought.  “If it goes on we shall have to make her jealous.  That would be an infallible remedy for her caprice.”

But Zara was not concerned with such things at all for the moment.  She was waiting anxiously for Mimo at their trysting-place, the mausoleum of Halicarnassus in the British Museum, and he was late.  He would have the last news of Mirko.  No reply had awaited her to her telegram to Mrs. Morley from Paris, and it had been too late to wire again last night.  And Mrs. Morley must have got the telegram, because Mimo had got his.

Some day, she hoped—­when she could grow perhaps more friendly with her husband—­she would get her uncle to let her tell him about Mirko.  It would make everything so much more simple as regards seeing him, and why, since the paper was all signed and nothing could be altered, should there be any mystery now?  Only, her uncle had said the day before the wedding,

“I beg of you not to mention the family disgrace of your mother to your husband nor speak to him of the man Sykypri for a good long time—­if you ever need.”

And she had acquiesced.

“For,” Francis Markrute had reasoned to himself, “if the boy dies, as Morley thinks there is every likelihood that he will, why should Tristram ever know?”

The disgrace of his adored sister always made him wince.

Mimo came at last, looking anxious and haggard, and not his debonair self.  Yes, he had had a telegram that morning.  He had sent one, as he was obliged to do, in her name, and hence the confusion in the answer.  Mrs. Morley had replied to the Neville Street address, and Zara wondered if she knew London very well and would see how impossible such a locality would be for the Lady Tancred!

But Mirko was better—­decidedly better—­the attack had again been very short.  So she felt reassured for the moment, and was preparing to go when she remembered that one of the things she had come for was to give Mimo some money in notes which she had prepared for him; but, knowing the poor gentleman’s character, she was going to do it delicately by buying the “Apache!” For she was quite aware that just money, for him to live, now that it was not a question of the welfare of Mirko, he would never accept from her.  In such unpractical, sentimental ways does breeding show itself in some weak natures!

Mimo was almost suspicious of the transaction, and she was obliged to soothe and flatter him by saying that he must surely always have understood how intensely she had admired that work; and now she was rich it would be an everlasting pleasure to her to own it for her very own.  So poor Mimo was comforted, and they parted after a while, all arrangements having been made that the telegrams—­should any more come—­were to go first, addressed to her at Neville Street, so that the poor father should see them and then send them on.