Cannot I do anything for you, my niece ?" Then she looked at him, and her eyes in their deep tragedy seemed to burn out of her deadly white face.
"No, thank you, my uncle,--there is nothing to be done--everything is now too late." Then she added in the same monotonous voice, "I am very tired, I think I will wish you a good night." And with immense dignity, she left him; and making her excuses with gentle grace to the Duke and Lady Ethelrida, she glided from the room.
And Francis Markrute, as he watched her, felt his whole being wrung with emotion and pain.
"My God!" he said to himself.

"She is a glorious woman, and it will--it must--come right--even yet." And then he set his brain to calculate how he could assist them, and finally his reasoning powers came back to him, and he comforted himself with the deductions he made.
She was going away alone with this most desirable young man into the romantic environment of Wrayth.

Human physical passion, to say the least of it, was too strong to keep them apart for ever, so he could safely leave the adjusting of this puzzle to the discretion of fate.
And Zara, freed at last from eye of friend or maid, collapsed on to the white bearskin in front of the fire again, and tried to think.

So she had been offered as a chattel and been refused! Here her spirit burnt with humiliation.

Her uncle, she knew, always had used her merely as a pawn in some game--what game?
He was not a snob; the position of uncle to Tristram would not have tempted him alone; he never did anything without a motive and a deep one.