head without enthusiasm, and took her own small pearls
from her ears, and replaced them by the big sapphire and diamond
earrings; a riviere of alternate solitaire sapphires and diamonds she
clasped round her snowy throat.

"You look absolutely beautiful," her uncle exclaimed with admiration. "I
knew I could perfectly trust to your taste--the dress is perfection."

"Then I suppose we shall have to go down," she said quietly.

She was perfectly calm, her face expressionless; if there was a
tempestuous suggestion in her somber eyes she generally kept the lids
lowered. Inwardly, she felt a raging rebellion. This was the first
ceremony of the sacrifice, and although in the abstract her fine senses
appreciated the jewels and all her new and beautiful clothes and
_apanages_, they in no way counterbalanced the hateful degradation.

To her it was a hideous mockery--the whole thing; she was just a
chattel, a part of a business bargain. She could not guess her uncle's
motive for the transaction (he had a deep one, of course), but Lord
Tancred's was plain and purely contemptible. Money! For had not the
whole degrading thing been settled before he had ever seen her? He was
worse than Ladislaus who, at all events, had been passionately in love,
in his revolting, animal way.

She knew nothing of the English customs, nor how such a thing as the
arrangement of this marriage, as she thought it was, was a perfectly
unknown impossibility, as an idea. She supposed that the entire family
were aware of the circumstances, and were willing to accept her only for
her uncle's wealth--she already hated and despised them all. Her idea
was, "_noblesse oblige_," and that a great and ancient house should
never stoop to such depths.

Francis Markrute looked at her when she said, "I suppose we shall have
to go down," with that icy calm. He felt faintly uneasy.

"Zara, it is understood you will be gracious? and _brusquer_ no one?"

But all the reply he received was a glance of scorn. She had given her
word and refused to discuss that matter.

And so they descended the stairs just in time to be standing ready to
receive Lord and Lady Coltshurst who were the first to be announced. He
was a spare, unintelligent, henpecked, elderly man, and she, a stout,
forbidding-looking lady. She had prominent, shortsighted eyes, and she
used longhandled glasses; she had also three chins, and did not resemble
the Guiscards in any way, except for her mouth and her