Sir Everard shuddered.

“From all such the gods deliver us!  You honor Miss Hunsden with your deepest interest, I think, Lady Louise?

“Yes, she is such an oddity.  Her wandering life, I presume, accounts for it; but she is altogether unlike any girl I ever know.  I am certain,” with a little malicious glance, “she will be your style, Sir Everard.”

“And as I don’t in the least know what my style is, perhaps you may be right.”

Lady Louise bit her lip—­it was a rebuff, she fancied, for her detraction.  And then Lady Carteret gave that mysterious signal, and the ladies rose and swept away in billows of silk to the drawing-room, and the gentlemen had the talk to themselves “across the walnuts and the wine.”

To one gentleman present the interim before rejoining the ladies was unmitigatedly dull, even though the talk ran on his favorite topics—–­horse-flesh and hunting.  He was in love, he thought complacently, and Lady Louise’s eyes had sparkled to-day and her smiles had flashed their bewildering brightness upon him more radiantly than ever before.

“How pleased my mother will be!” Sir Everard thought.  “I will ask Lady Louise this very night.  An earl’s daughter—­though a bankrupt—­is a fitting mate for a Kingsland.”

Lady Louise sat at the piano, the soft light falling full on her pale, statuesque face, and making an aureole around her fair, shapely head.

Sir Everard Kingsland crossed over and stood beside her, and Lord and Lady Carteret exchanged significant glances, and smiled.

It was a very desirable thing, indeed; they had brought Louise down for no other earthly reason; and Louise was playing her cards, and playing them well.

If Sir Everard had one taste stronger than another it was his taste for music, and Lady Louise held him spell-bound now.  She played, and her fingers seemed inspired; she sung, and few non-professionals sung like that.

The chain of brittle glass that bound the captive beside her grew stronger.  A wife who could bewitch the hours away with such music as this would be no undesirable possession for a blase man.  He stooped over her as she arose from the piano at last.

“Come out on the balcony,” he said.  “The night is lovely, and the good people yonder are altogether engrossed in their cards and their small-talk.”

Without a word she stepped with him from the open French window out into the starlit night.

What is it that Byron says about solitude, and moonlight, and youth?  A dangerous combination, truly; and so Sir Everard Kingsland found, standing side by side with this pale daughter of a hundred earls.  But the irrevocable words were not destined to be spoken, for just then George Grosvenor, goaded to jealous desperation, stalked out through the open casement and joined them.

The midnight moon was sailing up to the zenith as Sir Everard rode home.  His road was a lonely one through Brithlow Wood, which shortened his journey by over a mile; but his thoughts were pleasant ones, and he hummed, as he rode, the songs Lady Louise had sung.