“Devotion!” said Lionel.

“Oh, of course you don’t know what devotion is.  Your fashionable friends have taught you what good form is; you are blase, indifferent; it’s not women, it’s cards, that interest you.  You have no fresh feeling left,” continued this ingenue of the greenroom.  “You have been so spoiled—­”

“I see he’s up at the Garden Club,” said Lionel, to change the subject.

“Who?”

“The young gentleman you were just speaking of.”

“Percy Miles?  What does he want with an all-night club?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Ah, well, I suppose he is not likely to get in,” she said, turning to the tall mirror.  “Percy is very nice—­just the nicest boy I know—­but I’m afraid he is not particularly clever.  He has written some verses in one or two magazines—­of course you can’t expect me to criticise them severely, considering who was the ‘only begetter’ of them—­”

“Oh, that has nothing to do with it,” Lionel interrupted again.  “He is sure to get in.  There’s no qualification at the Garden, so long as you’re all right socially.  There are plenty such as he in the club already.”

“But why does he want to get in?” she said, wheeling round.  “Why should he want to sit up all night playing cards?  Now tell me honestly, Lionel, it isn’t your doing!  You didn’t ask him to join, did you?  You can’t be treasuring up any feeling of vengeance—­”

“Oh, nonsense; I had nothing to do with it.  I saw his name in the candidates’ book quite by accident.  And the election is by committee—­he’ll get in all right.  What does he want with it?—­oh, I don’t know.  Perhaps he has been disappointed in love and seeks for a little consolation in card-playing.”

“Yes, you always sneer at love—­because you don’t know anything about it,” she said, snappishly.  “Or perhaps you are an extinct volcano.  I suppose you have sighed your heart out like a furnace—­and for a foreigner, I’ll be bound!”

Nay, it was hardly to be wondered at that Miss Burgoyne should be indignant with so lukewarm and reluctant a lover, who received her coy advances with coldness, and was only decently civil to her when they talked of wholly indifferent matters.  The mischief of it was that, in casting about for some key to the odd situation, she took it into her head to become jealous of Nina; and many were the bitter things she managed to say about foreigners generally, and about Italians in particular, and Italian singers, and so forth.  Of course Miss Ross was never openly mentioned, but Lionel understood well enough at whom these covert innuendoes were hurled; and sometimes his eyes burned with a fire far other than that which should be in a lover’s eyes when contemplating his mistress.  Indeed, it was a dangerous amusement for Miss Burgoyne to indulge in.  It was easy to wound; it might be less easy to efface the memory of those wounds.  And then there was a kind of devilish ingenuity about her occult taunts.  For example, she dared not say that doubtless Miss Nina Ross had gone away back to Naples, and had taken up with a sweetheart, with whom she was now walking about; but she described the sort of young man calculated to capture the fancy of an Italian girl.