There was a low south wind, the water made a pleasant murmur, wending among its sedges.  She was very lovely, moreover; lying back there among her laces and Indian shawls, with the sunset in the brown depths of her eyes and on her delicate cheek.  And Bertie, as he looked on his liege lady, really had a glow of the old, real, foolish, forgotten feeling stir at his heart, as he gazed on her in the half-light, and thought, almost wistfully, “If the Jews were down on me to-morrow, would she really care, I wonder?”

Really care?  Bertie knew his world and its women too well to deceive himself in his heart about the answer.  Nevertheless, he asked the question.  “Would you care much, chere belle?”

“Care what?”

“If I came to grief—­went to the bad, you know; dropped out of the world altogether?”

She raised her splendid eyes in amaze, with a delicate shudder through all her laces.  “Bertie!  You would break my heart!  What can you dream of?”

“Oh, lots of us end so!  How is a man to end?” answered Bertie philosophically, while his thoughts still ran off in a speculative skepticism.  “Is there a heart to break?”

Her ladyship looked at him an laughed.

“A Werther in the Guards!  I don’t think the role will suit either you or your corps, Bertie; but if you do it, pray do it artistically.  I remember, last year, driving through Asnieres, when they had found a young man in the Seine; he was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and he held fast in his clinched hand a lock of gold hair.  Now, there was a man who knew how to die gracefully, and make his death an idyl!”

“Died for a woman?—­ah!” murmured Bertie, with the Brummel nonchalance of his order.  “I don’t think I should do that, even for you—­not, at least, while I had a cigar left.”

And then the boat drifted backward, while the stars grew brighter and the last reflection of the sun died out; and they planned to meet to-morrow, and talked of Baden, and sketched projects for the winter in Paris, and went in and sat by the window, taking their coffee, and feeling, in a half-vague pleasure, the heliotrope-scented air blowing softly in from the garden below, and the quiet of the starlit river in the summer evening, with a white sail gleaming here and there, or the gentle splash of an oar following on the swift trail of a steamer; the quiet, so still and so strange after the crowded rush of the London season.

“Would she really care?” thought Cecil, once more.  In that moment he could have wished to think she would.

But heliotrope, stars, and a river, even though it had been tawny and classical Tiber instead of ill-used and inodorous Thames, were not things sufficiently in the way of either of them to detain them long.  They had both seen the Babylonian sun set over the ruins of the Birs Nimrud, and had talked of Paris fashions while they did so; they had both leaned over the terraces of Bellosguardo, while the moon was full on Giotto’s tower, and had discussed their dresses for the Veglione masquerade.  It was not their style to care for these matters; they were pretty, to be sure, but they had seen so many of them.