Through the mantle of dusk the lights shine brightly in the Place VendÔme, but the room in the Hotel Bristol looks dark and dreary, save for the fitful flame of the fire, when Zai, who has grown tired of her own society, hears footsteps on the stairs.

All the long afternoon she has been alone; even “Baby,” her resource on most occasions, has slept through the hours as sound as the Seven Sleepers.

So, when a human tread falls welcome on her ear, she forgets that it is not quite the thing for a countess to rush out on the landing of a hotel.

“Is that you, Delaval?” she cries in a bright ringing voice, for she is longing to see him again, longing with a great longing that will not allow her to study the convenances. But she draws back as the figure of a stranger, a tall, handsome man, with a face after Velasquez, confronts her.

“Pardonne, Madame!” he says in a very low voice—and there is a gentle sympathetic ring in it, for De Belcour is a thorough gentleman by nature as well as by birth—“I have a mission to fulfil, a mission which pains me more than I can say,” he adds earnestly, as he looks on the fair sweet young face of his rival’s wife.

But Zai does not speak, something—a dreadful instinct—seems to gather round her heart, like an iron band. She stands as white as an image of marble and as motionless as if she were rooted to the ground—with the glad laugh on her pretty lips hushed into an awful silence, and with a terrible fear filling her big grey eyes, as, slowly passing her, they bear their burden into the room, and place it upon the very couch where she had lain this afternoon full of hope and happiness and with the sunshine of life dancing in her eyes and breaking into smiles on her mouth, for Zai is young and lovely and rich, and she adores her husband and the child that God has given her.

Not a word falls from her now, and she never stirs from the spot where she stands, but all the while she vigilantly watches the movements of the men, and follows them with great piteous looks, and her little hands clench and twist together in terror and despair.

“He is not dead!” De Belcour whispers, “but—dying, I fear.”

“Not dead!” The words break from her almost in a shout of joy, and she springs past him and crouches down beside what they have brought her—beside all that is left of him. Her eyes are quite dry, and glitter, undimmed by a single tear, as she sways backwards and forwards in the plenitude and abjectness of her suffering.

Then she raises a white, forlorn face, and falters:

“Is no one coming to him?”

And De Belcour, who feels himself moved to a great compassion for this slender bit of a girl, stricken down in the very beginning and flush of her life, bows his head in answer.

She forgets his presence then. Bending over her husband, she touches his closed lids and his cold cheeks very softly and caressingly, as if her little fingers loved to linger in their task. She puts her hand on his heart, which beats, but so faintly as if each throb were its last, and she keeps on murmuring tender words to the ears which do not hear them.

“Delaval, darling, speak to me, only one word—one little word, Delaval, that I may just hear your voice. Oh, God! won’t he speak to me again? shall I never hear him speak kind, dear words as he did to-day—before he went away to—die? Die! Oh! you won’t die, Delaval, darling, my own darling, you have not left me—left me—for ever!”

The last words go out from her in a wail loud enough, and piteous enough, to reach the sky.

Faint and dizzy with fear, she stretches out her trembling hands, like a blind woman, towards the form lying before her with the rigidity of death, but, before they reach it, she falls back and drops senseless on the floor.

* * * * *

Maybe her piteous cry has reached beyond the sky, for he has not left her “for ever.”

The shot of a vengeful woman, wounded in her terrible love, driven to the phrensy of a wild beast, has grazed the right lung, and for a long time he hovers between life and death, while his wife nurses him unwearyingly night and day with a devoted unselfish love that is not often to be found in the worldly daughters of Belgravia.

Then, after a little, when they tell him he has crept slowly—slowly, but surely—out of the shadows—and that life (not the old life, but one twin with suffering perchance) yet lies before him, he feels that he will regain health and strength sooner if the burden of a secret is removed from him.

It is very hard to face Zai as he makes a clean breast of it, but he does it.

“My pet,” he murmurs, in a low weak voice which is very unlike his old accents, and the sound of which goes right to her heart, “I have something to say to you.”

So she kneels down beside him. It is the place she likes best now in the world.

“Do you love me very much, Zai?” he asks her, while his thin white hand rests on her shining chesnut hair, and, looking up, she sees that there is an actual mist of tears in his handsome ultramarine eyes.

“Ah, don’t I?” she whispers, catching hold of his hand and kissing it passionately, and he reads plainly enough the love that is patent on her face.

“But would you love me so much, Zai, if you knew that I had been unfaithful—that I had forgotten you just for a little while?” he asks, his lips quivering and his heart beating very fast. For somehow he holds on to her love with a strange tenacity. It seems, in truth, to be the only—only—thing worth living for.

She does not answer for a moment, but she has his hand still clasped close in her own, while her face grows deathly white, and there is a startled, stricken look in her grey eyes that cuts him to the heart.

“It is quite true, Zai. For a little while I did forget you. Another woman’s face came between us, and for the life of me I couldn’t shake off its power over me, though I tried. Upon my soul I tried!”

He pauses, breathless, and a pallor creeps over his face—a face as handsome as Apollo’s, in spite of suffering.

“Well, Zai, I saw her, not more than half-a-dozen times, perhaps, but each time she seemed to draw me closer and closer to her, and further—from—you—till the—last time.”

Zai listens to it all—to this confession of sin and wrong—her gaze never swerving from his face, and her heart full to bursting.

“Did you kiss her, Delaval?” she whispers at last in a faint, scared voice, and on the impulse of the moment she puts up her little fingers to stop her ears, in dread of his saying “Yes.” Then she drops them desolately.

“No! thank God I never did!” he says quite heartily, and Zai breathes more freely. And, the tension gone, she lays her head down on his arm and cries like a child, but the tears are more of relief than of bitterness, and the world does not look half as dreary to her as it did a few minutes ago.

“No! I thank God, that you have nothing to forgive on that score, though I am bound to say that both the spirit was willing and the flesh was weak; but a lucky fate prevented it. No! it was only my heart, Zai! Pshaw! fancy my calling it my heart. It was only my senses, Zai!”

She ponders a moment. It is dreadful to know that he has been caring for another woman; but still it is a great comfort—a very, very great comfort—to know that he has not kissed her. So she lifts up her face with a smile, half-piteous, half-glad, on her mouth, and her arm steals round his neck.

Poor fellow, he looks so thin and white and haggard, she could not be angry with him for the world.

“Well, my little one?” he says, but he knows quite well that she loves him so much she will never be hard on him, and, after all, it was only a venial sin, he thinks, with the self-indulgent complacency so common to the style of man he is.

“I forgive you!” she whispers between fond fervent kisses on his lips, “for you know, darling, that ‘to err is human.’”

“Yes! my own, own love! And ‘to forgive—divine!’”

But there is one secret yet that Lord Delaval keeps religiously from his wife’s innocent ears. It is, that the woman who tempted him was—Gabrielle!

THE END.