the young lady, you would have found that of real beauty she possessed little.  A small, pretty doll’s face with blue eyes and gold-coloured ringlets; a round face, betraying nothing very great, or good, or intellectual; only something fascinating and pretty.  Her chief beauty lay in her complexion; by candle-light it was radiantly lovely, a pure red and white, looking like wax-work.  A pretty, graceful girl she looked; and, what with her fascinations of person, of dress, and of manner, all of which she perfectly well knew how to display, she had contrived to lead more than one heart captive, and to hold it in fast chains.

The light of the gas chandelier shone on her now; on her blue gauzy dress, set off with ribbons, on her sleepy, blue eyes, on her rose-coloured cheeks.  She was figuring off before the glass, I say, twisting her ringlets round her fingers, and putting them in various positions to try the effect; her employment, her look, her manner, all indicating the very essence of vanity.  The opening of the door caused her to turn her head, and she shook her ringlets into their proper place, and dropped her hands by her side, at the entrance of Lionel Verner.

“Oh, Lionel! is it you?” said she, with as much composure as if she had not been caught gazing at herself.  “I was looking at this,” pointing to an inverted tumbler on the mantel-piece.  “Is it not strange that we should see a moth at this cold season?  Amilly found it this afternoon on the geraniums.”

Lionel Verner advanced and bent his head to look at the pretty speckled moth reposing so still on its green leaf.  Did he see through the artifice?  Did he suspect that the young lady had been admiring her own pretty face, and not the moth?  Not he.  Lionel’s whole heart had long ago been given to that vain butterfly, Sibylla West, who was gay and fluttering, and really of little more use in life than the moth.  How was it that he had suffered himself to love her?  Suffered!  Love plays strange tricks, and it has fooled many a man as it was fooling Lionel Verner.

And what of Sibylla?  Sibylla did not love him.  The two ruling passions of her heart were vanity and ambition.  To be sometime the mistress of Verner’s Pride was a very vista of desire, and therefore she encouraged Lionel.  She did not encourage him very much; she was rather in the habit of playing fast and loose with him; but that only served to rivet tighter the links of his chain.  All the love—­such as it was!—­that Sibylla West was capable of giving, was in possession of Frederick Massingbird.  Strange tricks again!  It was scarcely credible that one should fall in love with him by the side of attractive Lionel; but so it had been.  Sibylla loved Frederick Massingbird for himself, she liked Lionel because he was the heir to Verner’s Pride, and she had managed to keep both her slaves.