“No?  Did she tell you so?” and Florian laughed, “What a confiding little darling you are, Angela!  I assure you, Sylvie Hermenstein is not so very particular—­but there!  I will not say a word against any friend of yours!  But do you not see she is already trying to make a fool of Aubrey Leigh?”

Angela looked across the room and saw Leigh’s intellectual head bending closely towards the soft gold of Sylvie’s hair, and smiled.

“I do not think Sylvie would willingly make a fool of anyone,” she answered simply, “She is too loyal and sincere.  I fancy you do not understand her, Florian.  She is full of fascination, but she is not heartless.”

But Florian entertained a very lively remembrance of the recent rebuff given to himself by the fair Comtesse, and took his masculine vengeance by the suggested innuendo of a shrug of his shoulders and a lifting of his eyebrows.  But he said no more just then, and merely contented himself with coaxingly abstracting a rose out of Angela’s bodice, kissing it, and placing it in his own buttonhole.  This was one of his “pretty drawing-room tricks” according to Loyse D’Agramont who always laughed unmercifully at these kind of courtesies.  They had been the stock-in-trade of her late husband, and she knew exactly what value to set upon them.  But Angela was easily moved by tenderness, and the smallest word of love, the lightest caress made her happy and satisfied for a long time.  She had the simple primitive notions of an innocent woman who could not possibly imagine infidelity in a sworn love.  Looking at her sweet face, earnest eyes, and slim graceful figure now, as she moved away from Florian Varillo’s side, and passed glidingly in and out among her guests, the Princesse D’Agramont, always watchful, wondered with a half sigh how she would take the blow of disillusion if it ever came; would it crush her, or would she rise the nobler and stronger for it?

“Many a one here in this room to-day,” mused the Princesse, “would be glad if she fell vanquished in the hard fight!  Many a man—­ shameful as it seems—­would give a covert kick to her poor body.  For there is nothing that frets and irks some male creatures so much as to see a woman attain by her own brain and hand a great position in the world, and when she has won her crown and throne they would deprive her of both, and trample her in the mud if they dared!  Some male creatures—­not all.  Florian Varillo for instance.  If he could only get the world to believe that he paints half Angela’s pictures he would be quite happy.  I daresay he does persuade a few outsiders to think it.  But in Rome we know better.  Poor Angela!”