“It should do so!” and Varillo set the little Japanese dog carefully down on the floor, whereupon it ran straight to its mistress, uttering tiny cries of joy, “There is no sweeter triumph for a woman than to see men subjugated by her smile, and intimidated by her frown;—­to watch them burning themselves like moths in her clear flame, and dying at her feet for love of her!  The woman who can do these things is gifted with the charm which makes or ruins life,—­ few can resist her,—­she draws sensitive souls as a magnet draws the needle,—­and the odd part of it all is that she need not have any heart herself—­she need not feel one pulse of the passion with which she inspires others—­indeed it is better that she should not.  The less she is moved herself, the greater is her fascination.  Love clamours far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!”

Sylvie was silent for a minute or two looking at him with something of doubt and disdain.  The room they were in was one of those wide and lofty apartments which in old days might have been used for a prince’s audience chamber, or a dining hall for the revelry of the golden youth of Imperial Rome.  The ceiling, supported by eight slender marble columns, was richly frescoed with scenes from Ariosto’s poems, some of the figures being still warm with colour and instinct with life—­and on the walls were the fading remains of other pictures, the freshest among them being a laughing Cupid poised on a knot of honeysuckle, and shooting his arrow at random into the sky.  Ordinarily speaking, the huge room was bare and comfortless to a degree,—­but the Comtesse Sylvie’s wealth, combined with her good taste, had filled it with things that made it homelike as well as beautiful.  The thickest velvet pile carpets laid over the thickest of folded mattings, covered the marble floors, and deprived them of their usual chill,—­great logs of wood burned cheerfully in the wide chimney, and flowers, in every sort of quaint vase or bowl, made bright with colour and blossom all dark and gloomy corners, and softened every touch of melancholy away.  A grand piano stood open,—­ a mandoline tied with bright ribbons, lay on a little table near a cluster of roses and violets,—­books, music, drawings, bits of old drapery and lace were so disposed as to hide all sharp corners and forbidding angles,—­and where the frescoes on the wall were too damaged to be worth showing even in outline, some fine old Flemish tapestry covered the defect.  Sylvie herself, in the exquisite clothing which she always made it her business to wear, was the brilliant completion of the general picturesqueness,—­and Florian Varillo seemed to think so as he looked at her with the practised underglance of admiration which is a trick common to Italians, and which some women accept as a compliment and others resent as an insult.

“Do you not agree with me?” he said persuasively, with a smile which showed his fine and even teeth to perfection, “When the chase is over the hunters go home tired!  What a man cannot have, that very thing is what he tries most to obtain!”