Villiers flashed back an amused, responsive glance, and then conscientiously strove to pay more attention to the irrepressible feminine philologist beside him, determining to take her, as he said to himself, by way of penance for his unremembered sins.  After a while there came one of those extraordinary, sudden rushes of gabble that often occur at even the stiffest dinner-party,—­a galloping race of tongues, in which nothing really distinct is heard, but in which each talks to the other as though moved by an impulse of sheer desperation.  This burst of noise was a relief after the strained murmurs of trite commonplaces that had hitherto been the order of the hour, and the fair Duchess, somewhat easier in her mind, turned anew to Alwyn, with greater grace and gentleness of manner than she had yet shown.

“I am afraid,” she said smilingly, “you must find us all very stupid after your travels abroad?  In England we are dull,—­our tristesse cannot be denied.  But, really, the climate is responsible,—­we want more sunshine.  I suppose in the East, where the sun is so warm and bright, the people are always cheerful?”

“On the contrary, I have found them rather serious and contemplative than otherwise,” returned Alwyn,—­“yet their gravity is certainly of a pleasant, and not of a forbidding type.  I don’t myself think the sun has much to do with the disposition of man, after all,—­I fancy his temperament is chiefly moulded by the life he leads.  In the East, for instance, men accept their existence as a sort of divine command, which they obey cheerfully, yet with a consciousness of high responsibility:—­on the Continent they take it as a bagatelle, lightly won, lightly lost, hence their indifferent, almost childish, gayety;—­but in Great Britain”—­and he smiled,—­“it looks nowadays as if it were viewed very generally as a personal injury and bore,—­a kind of title bestowed without the necessary money to keep it up!  And this money people set themselves steadily to obtain, with many a weary grunt and groan, while they are, for the most part, forgetful of anything else life may have to offer.”

“But what is life without plenty of money?” inquired the Duchess carelessly—­“Surely, not worth the trouble of living!”

Alwyn looked at her steadily, and a swift flush colored her smooth cheek.  She toyed with the magnificent diamond spray at her breast, and wondered what strange spell was in this man’s brilliant gray-black eyes!—­did he guess that she—­even she—­had sold herself to the Duc de la Santoisie for the sake of his money and title as easily and unresistingly as though she were a mere purchasable animal?

“That is an argument I would rather not enter into,” he said gently—­“It would lead us too far.  But I am convinced, that whether dire poverty or great riches be our portion, life, considered apart from its worldly appendages, is always worth living, if lived well.”

“Pray, how can you separate life from its worldly appendages?”—­ inquired a satirical-looking gentleman opposite—­“Life is the world, and the things of the world; when we lose sight of the world, we lose ourselves,—­in short, we die,—­and the world is at an end, and we with it.  That’s plain practical philosophy.”