“Ah!  You are not well!” exclaimed Madame with deep concern.  “It is the perfume which that foolish Ah Li has lighted.  He forgets that we are in England.”

“Not at all,” protested Deacon faintly, and conscious that he was making a fool of himself.  “I think I have perhaps been overdoing it rather of late.  Forgive me if I sit down.”

He sank on the cushioned divan, his heart beating furiously, while Madame touched the little bell, whereupon one of the servants entered.

She spoke in Chinese, pointing to the incense-burner.

Ah Li bowed and removed the censer.  As the door softly reclosed: 

“You are better?” she whispered, sweetly solicitous, and, seating herself beside Deacon, she laid her hand lightly upon his arm.

“Quite,” he replied hoarsely; “please do not worry about me.  I am wondering what has become of Annesley.”

“Ah, the poor man!” exclaimed Madame, with a silver laugh, and began to busy herself with the teacups.  “He remembered, as he was looking at my new Leonardo, an appointment which he had quite forgotten.”

“I can understand his forgetting anything under the circumstances.”

Madame de Medici raised a tiny cup and bent slightly toward him.  He felt that he was losing control of himself, and, averting his eyes, he stooped and smelled the orchid in his buttonhole.  Then, accepting the cup, he was about to utter some light commonplace when the faintness returned overwhelmingly, and, hurriedly replacing the cup upon the tray, he fell back among the cushions.  The stifling perfume of the place seemed to be choking him.

“Ah, poor boy!  You are really not at all well.  How sorry I am!”

The sweet tones reached him as from a great distance; but as one dying in the desert turns his face toward the distant oasis, Deacon turned weakly to the speaker.  She placed one fair arm behind his head, pillowing him, and with a peacock fan which had lain amid the cushions fanned his face.  The strange scene became wholly unreal to him; he thought himself some dying barbaric chief.

“Rest there,” murmured the sweet voice.

The great eyes, unveiled now by the black lashes, were two twin lakes of fairest amber.  They seemed to merge together, so that he stood upon the brink of an unfathomable amber pool—­which swallowed him up—­which swallowed him up.

He awoke to an instantaneous consciousness of the fact that he had been guilty of inexcusably bad form.  He could not account for his faintness, and reclining there amid the silken cushions, with Madame de Medici watching him anxiously, he felt a hot flush stealing over his face.

“What is the matter with me!” he exclaimed, and sprang to his feet.  “I feel quite well now.”

She watched him, smiling, but did not speak.  He was a “very young man” again, and badly embarrassed.  He glanced at his wrist-watch.