"Indeed!"--and Sir Chetwynd roused himself at the name--"Armand
Gervase! THE Armand Gervase?"

"The only one original," laughed the other. "He's come here to
make studies of Eastern women. A rare old time he'll have among
them, I daresay! He's not famous for character. He ought to paint
the Princess Ziska."

"Ah, by-the-bye, I wanted to ask you about that lady. Does anyone
know who she is? My wife is very anxious to find out whether she
is--well--er--quite the proper person, you know! When one has
young girls, one cannot be too careful."

Ross Courtney, the man on the divan, got up slowly and stretched
his long athletic limbs with a lazy enjoyment in the action. He
was a sporting person with unhampered means and large estates in
Scotland and Ireland; he lived a joyous, "don't-care" life of
wandering about the world in search of adventures, and he had a
scorn of civilized conventionalities--newspapers and their editors
among them. And whenever Sir Chetwynd spoke of his "young girls"
he was moved to irreverent smiling, as he knew the youngest of the
twain was at least thirty. He also recognized and avoided the wily
traps and pitfalls set for him by Lady Chetwynd Lyle in the hope
that he would yield himself up a captive to the charms of Muriel
or Dolly; and as he thought of these two fair ones now and
involuntarily compared them in his mind with the other woman just
spoken of, the smile that had begun to hover on his lips deepened
unconsciously till his handsome face was quite illumined with its
mirth.