her.
Slipping off her cloak and with a finger to her lips, she went quietly
upstairs and stood leaning against the side of the door.

It was wild music that she heard; music that made the blood in her
temples and throat pulse harder than ever. Breathing deep, she waited
for the climax, and when it came, quietly opened the door.

She had chosen her moment well, and as the door faced a long mirror
between the windows she saw, as she stood on the threshold, not only
Joyselle, who, alone in the room, stood staring in amazement, but also
that at which he stared--herself. Clad in a dress made apparently
entirely of flexible dull gold scales, the long lines of her figure
unbroken by any belt or trimming, the woman in the glass stood smiling
like a witch of old, a deep colour in her cheeks, the palms of her hands
held down by her side, the fingers outspread and slightly lifted as if
in water. Quite silently she stood and smiled until the man before her
dropped his violin--for the first time, she knew instinctively, in his
life.

Then she spoke, saying his name, the name by which the world knew him:
"_Joyselle._"

"_Mon Dieu!_" he returned softly. Coming slowly forward he caught her
hand with clumsy haste and kissed it. Her heart stopped its mad beating,
for she had won. Here was no Beau-papa. Here was the man, Victor
Joyselle.

CHAPTER FOUR

"I did not know you," he said. "I thought--_juste ciel_, how do I know
what I thought? You are so beautiful, I----"

She laughed gently. "Beau-papa! Beau-papa! Where is Theo?"

For she knew now that she would not break her engagement to-night. The
end was not yet. And by the strange laws that govern things emotional
between men and women, her self-control, hitherto utterly lamed by his
presence, was now, in face of his involuntary, as yet evidently
unconscious awakening, restored to her tenfold strong. She could have
spent weeks alone with the man without betraying her secret, now that
she had established her power over him. It had been his acceptance of
the fact of her future relationship to him, his unexpressed feeling that
she was a being of another generation, his tacit refusal to see in her
the woman _per se_, that had beaten her. Now she had, by the plain
assertion of her beauty, the enforcing of the appreciation of it as a
thing appertaining to her as a woman, not a daughter, got the reins--and
the whip--into her own hands.

"Where," she repeated, still smiling,