“Yes,” she replied quietly, “it is Foy.”

“Foy!  Foy!  Hear her, ye gods!  My successful rival, mine, is the yellow-headed, muddy-brained, unlettered Foy—­and they say that women have souls!  Of your courtesy answer me one question.  Tell me when did this strange and monstrous thing happen?  When did you declare yourself vanquished by the surpassing charms of Foy?”

“Yesterday afternoon, if you want to know,” she said in the same calm and ominous voice.

Adrian heard, and an inspiration took him.  He dashed his hand to his brow and thought a moment; then he laughed loud and shrilly.

“I have it,” he said.  “It is the love charm which has worked perversely.  Elsa, you are under a spell, poor woman; you do not know the truth.  I gave you the philtre in your drinking water, and Foy, the traitor Foy, has reaped its fruits.  Dear girl, shake yourself free from this delusion, it is I whom you really love, not that base thief of hearts, my brother Foy.”

“What do you say?  You gave me a philtre?  You dare to doctor my drink with your heathen nastiness?  Out of the way, sir!  Stand off, and never venture to speak to me again.  Well will it be for you if I do not tell your brother of your infamy.”

What happened after this Adrian could never quite remember, but a vision remained of himself crouching to one side, and of a door flung back so violently that it threw him against the wall; a vision, too, of a lady sweeping past him with blazing eyes and lips set in scorn.  That was all.

For a while he was crushed, quite crushed; the blow had gone home.  Adrian was not only a fool, he was also the vainest of fools.  That any young woman on whom he chose to smile should actually reject his advances was bad and unexpected, but that the other man should be Foy—­oh! this was infamous and inexplicable.  He was handsomer than Foy, no one would dream of denying it.  He was cleverer and better read, had he not mastered the contents of every known romance—­high-souled works which Foy bluntly declared were rubbish and refused even to open?  Was he not a poet?  But remembering a certain sonnet he did not follow this comparison.  In short, how was it conceivable that a woman looking upon himself, a very type of the chivalry of Spain, silver-tongued, a follower—­nay, a companion of the Muses, one to whom in every previous adventure of the heart to love had been to conquer, could still prefer that broad-faced, painfully commonplace, if worthy, young representative of the Dutch middle classes, Foy van Goorl?

It never occurred to Adrian to ask himself another question, namely, how it comes about that eight young women out of ten are endowed with an intelligence or instinct sufficiently keen to enable them to discriminate between an empty-headed popinjay of a man, intoxicated with the fumes of his own vanity, and an honest young fellow of stable character and sterling worth?  Not that Adrian was altogether empty-headed, for in