The world spoke well of her. "She was certainly a great coquette," people said, indulgently, but then she was so beautiful and so much admired. She smiles as she reads the fashionable intelligence; there is a paragraph describing her appearance at a ball given by one of the queens of society. The paper speaks of her beauty, her magnificent dress and costly jewels. She remembered all the homage, the sighs, the whispered words, the honeyed compliments, smiled and thought how sweet life was.
At that moment her maid entered. "My lady," she said. "Colonel Mostyn would be so much obliged if you could see him. It is on important business."
"Certainly. I will see him here," she replied. "What can he want with me?" thought my lady. "He was very empresse last night; surely he is not going to make love to me."
And the notion of a gray-haired lover piqued her and made her smile again.
The colonel entered with the most courtly of bows, and she received him graciously. He talked of the opera, of the ball, of the last new novel, of the latest marriage on the tapis, and all the time Lady Lisle's beautiful eyes were looking at him. "It was not for this you came," she thought. At last the colonel spoke openly.
"I have come to ask of you a great favor, Lady Lisle," he said. "You have perhaps heard of my young kinsman, Basil Carruthers?"
"The heir of Ulverston?" she said. "Certainly. He is one of the prizes in the matrimonial market at present, colonel."
Colonel Mostyn drew a very animated and interesting portrait of his young charge.
"He wants modernizing; his ideas are dated two hundred years back. Lady Lisle, there is no one who could work such wonders for him as you."
"What could I do?" she asked, with a conscious smile.
"You could modernize him and humanize him. Will you allow me to introduce him to you? And will you take him in hand a little--teach him something of life as it is, not as he dreams of it?"
"What if he burns his wings, like many other silly moths?" she asked, laughingly.
"It would do him all the good in the world," he replied, with enthusiasm. "Will you believe, Lady Lisle, that he never admired any one, not even Lady Evelyn Hope? He never admired any face until he saw yours last evening." That piqued her. "I have never seen anything like his indifference to all ladies. Dear Lady Lisle, you are the brilliant sun that alone can melt this icicle. I assure you, that his mother and myself are in despair."