‘The “Zostera” looks tempting in the sunshine,’ said Nadine Napraxine, as she rose and leaned on the marble balustrade to gaze over the sea, where the stately sailing yacht of Geraldine was at anchor outside the little bay of La Jacquemerille, which was too shallow to be entered. ‘I will go out in her in ten minutes’ time. I prefer to watch the sunset from the sea, and the sunset will be very fine to-day, for there are a few clouds above; the sky is usually so terribly monotonous here, it is like an eulogy of your predecessor at the Academy: il y a trop de bleu. Monsignore, I will take you back to Nice by the coast. I dislike coasting usually, but along this shore it is pretty, and besides, it is too late to go far out to sea. Lord Geraldine, go and give your men the order. I will go and change my clothes.—Wilkes, you will come?’

Geraldine sullenly obeyed, and went down the steps to where his long boat was still in waiting. In a very few moments the Princess Napraxine returned, not clothed in any maritime fashion, for she thought that sort of thing theatrical, foolish, and staring; but wearing a dark serge gown, fitting with marvellous precision to the perfect contour and lines of her form, and carrying a scarlet parasol large enough to shelter the dignity of any Chinese mandarin. She wore yachting shoes and scarlet stockings; her feet, like her hands, were such as sculptors dream of but seldom see.

‘Tell them to put in my furs,’ she said to Geraldine. ‘Are you ready? It is always so cold here when the sun has gone down. We will take Count Othmar and Monsignore Melville to Nice. It is a beautiful day for a sail, just wind enough and not too much. Platon goes to his adored tripot; I wonder he stayed to eat his breakfast.’

‘The “Zostera,” of course, is at your commands,’ murmured Geraldine, with ill-disguised ill-humour. ‘For myself, if you will excuse me, I will accompany the Prince.’

She smiled, understanding his ill-humour well enough.

‘How immoral they are!’ she said to Melville. ‘The salle de jeu by daylight is monstrous; but since it is their form of happiness——’

‘Happiness!’ muttered Geraldine between his teeth.

‘All your preaching and mine will not alter them,’ she continued. ‘It is an extraordinary thing; neither Platon nor Lord Geraldine cares a straw for money; neither of them would awake a whit merrier if their fortunes were quadrupled to-morrow; and yet they find absolute intoxication in playing for money! What an inexplicable anomaly! Othmar is far more consistent. He despises his own fortune and the table of M. Blanc with equal sincerity.’

‘I do not despise wealth, I dislike it,’ said Othmar.

‘Why should you do either?’ said Melville. ‘Look at the immense potentialities of great riches.’

‘That is what I said this morning,’ continued Princess Nadine.

‘Surely great riches help one very nearly to happiness,’ continued Melville. ‘I do not mean from the bourgeois point of view, but simply because they remove so many material obstacles in the way of happiness. There can be hardly any great difficulties for a very rich man. He goes where he chooses, he can purchase whatever he desires; there are swept aside from his path for ever all the thousand and one annoyances and hindrances which beset the man who is not rich. Only imagine a person who cannot reach his dying child because he has not money enough for the journey; imagine another who has his homestead made intolerable to him by the erection of a steam-mill, and yet is obliged to end his days in it because he cannot afford to move; imagine yet another with weak lungs, who would recover his strength if he could take a house in the country, in the south, and yet cannot leave his business, which chains him to a city in the north. Those are the sort of sorrows from which wealth sets free a man or a woman. One may say roughly, I think, that if his health be good, a very rich person is exempt from all other misfortunes than those which come to him from his affections or his friendships; his troubles are, in a word, entirely those of sentiment.’

‘Precisely,’ said Nadine Napraxine.

‘Un seul Être est mort et tout est dÉpeuplÉ!’

murmured Othmar; ‘you will not allow, or cannot comprehend that, Princess?’

‘I can imagine that a man might fancy so for twenty-four hours; but even if the fancy endure, a rich man can enjoy his desolation while a poor man cannot. Part of the advantages of the rich man consists in his having the leisure and the luxury to muse upon his own unhappiness. I think you forget what a great happiness that is!’

‘You believe neither in love nor in sorrow,’ said Othmar, abruptly.

‘I am aware they exist, if you mean that,’ she replied; ‘but their existence chiefly depends upon the imagination.’

Othmar gave an impatient gesture.

‘And, like all pleasures of the imagination,’ she added, ‘require leisure for their development. The rich man or woman enjoys that leisure, and if he or she like to raise a gigantic mushroom under glass, in the way of exaggerated affections or sentimental regrets, they are at liberty to do so. Besides, surely, no one can deny that there is a captivating sense of power in vast riches; the fancy can take endless flights in that golden sphere; we do not know that delight, because, though people think us rich, in reality we are no such thing, in reality our expenses keep for ever ahead of our income, as I think they do with most people; but Othmar, who is actually, positively, fabulously rich, who is all alone, who spends nothing on himself—at least, he used to spend nothing—why, he could build you a cathedral, Monsignore Melville, in every city of the world of jasper and chalcedony, whatever they are, and never be a sou the poorer for doing it.’

‘Are you inclined, Count Othmar?’ said Melville.

‘If it would make all men like you I should be so,’ said Othmar. ‘But I regret to see that the Princess Napraxine has apparently retained only one recollection of me, and that one is of my “wall of ingots,” as she termed it, which appears to separate me from her sympathies.’

‘Did you hear that?’ she said, not very well pleased, though it was not in human power to confuse her. ‘We will let those people go to Monte Carlo, and we will have a run before the wind and leave you and Monsignore at Nice.’

‘But it is not my own yacht.’

‘But it is mine when I am in it, and I invite you both. Come.’

Othmar hesitated till she gave him a little look, one brief fleeting look. Two years seemed to have fled away; he was again on the staircase of the Grand OpÉra, she gave him her fan to carry, she had on a cloak of soft white feathers, a gardenia dropped out of her bouquet, he picked it up; in the whole glittering mass of Paris he only saw that one delicate face, pale as a narcissus, with two wonderful liquid eyes like night; and, with a sort of shock, he recollected himself, and realised that he was standing on the terrace of La Jacquemerille beside a woman whom he had vowed to put out of his life for ever and aye.

‘Come!’ said Princess Nadine, and he did not resist her.

He followed in her shadow down the flight of marble steps leading to the sea; while Geraldine, with a tempestuous rage stifled in his heart, drove Napraxine (who never drove himself), as furiously as Russian horses can be driven, along the sunny road, shaded with olives and caruba trees, which led from La Jacquemerille to the gambler’s paradise a few miles westward on the shore.

‘When boys sulk, they should always be punished,’ thought the Princess Nadine with silent diversion, as she heard the plunge and rush of the horses on the other side of the gardens, and divined that their driver was already repenting of the moment of petulance and of jealousy in which he had exiled himself from her presence, and condemned himself to the society of her lord.

‘Poor Platon is the dullest of companions, and Geraldine thinks it dans son rÔle to detest him; and yet he goes with him by way of showing his pique against Othmar. How stupid, how intensely stupid!’ she thought, with exceeding amusement to herself, as she descended the water-stairs and stepped into Geraldine’s boat.

It was droll to her that anybody should either detest or envy her husband, he was so infinitesimally little in her own life. She readily did justice to his good humour, his loyalty, his courage, and his honesty; but those qualities were all obscured by his dulness and heaviness, and also by the simple fact that he was her husband, as the good points in a landscape are blotted out by a fog. ‘Dogs’ virtues! all of them,’ she called them, with a mixture of esteem and impatience, of appreciation and contempt.

The boat glided through a quarter of a mile of blue water, and brought them to the side of Geraldine’s yacht, a beautiful racer-like schooner with canvas white as foam, and flying the pennon of Cowes.

‘My poor “Berenice” was once as elegant and spotless as this,’ said Othmar, ‘but she has been through sore stress of weather. Her sails are rags, her sides are battered, her rudder is gone. She made a sorry spectacle when we hove to last night, but I am attached to her. I shall not buy another yacht.’

‘You always take things so seriously,’ said Princess Nadine. ‘A yacht is a toy like any other; when one is broken get another. Why should you be attached to a thing of teak and copper?’

‘She has served me well,’ he said simply. ‘You do not understand attachment of any kind, Princess.’

‘It is only an amiable form of prejudice. Certainly I do not understand why you should be attached to a thing made of wood and metal.’

‘Or to a thing made of flesh and blood! I believe that is equally ridiculous in the eyes of Madame Napraxine,’ said Othmar, with some bitterness. ‘May I ask, how are your children?’ he added after a pause.

‘My two ugly little boys? Oh, quite well; they are never anything else. They are as strong as ponies. They are very ugly; they have the Tartar face, which is the ugliest in Europe; they are so like Platon that it is quite absurd.’

Othmar was silent; the words did not seem to him in her usual perfectly good taste. They did not accord with the delicate narcissus-like face of their speaker.

‘I remember that you never cared for your children,’ he said, and added, after a pause, ‘Nor for anything that had the misfortune to love you.’

‘I do not think the children love me at all,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Why should they? Their father they adore because he adores them. It is always quid pro quo in any love.’

‘Not always,’ said Othmar, curtly.

‘Ah, you love me still,’ thought Princess Nadine, without astonishment.

Aloud she said, ‘It must be, or the thing is absurd, it dies a natural death, or rather, is starved to death; nothing one-sided has any strength.’

‘I think you have seen many living proofs to the contrary,’ he answered. ‘But pride may strangle a love which is not shared; it is a violent death, but a sure one.’

‘Why will men always talk of love?’ she said, with some impatience. ‘After all, how little place it takes up in real life! ambition, society, amusement, politics, money-making, a hundred things, take up a hundredfold more space.’

‘It is not to every one the unnecessary molecule that it is to Madame Napraxine,’ said Othmar. ‘You have seen a glass of water touched by a single drop of quinine? It is only a drop, but it embitters the whole glassful. So do the attachments of life embitter it.’

‘If you put the drop in, no doubt,’ said Princess Napraxine, drily.

‘Or if some one else put it in,’ muttered Othmar, ‘before one knows what one drinks.’

‘Oh! one must never let others meddle with one, even in drinking a glass of water,’ replied his tormentor. She knew very well that he meant to reproach her, but she bore the reproach lightly. If the remembrance of her embittered any man’s existence it was not her fault; it was the fault of those who would not be content with adoring her as the poor people of this sea-shore adored their Madonna shut away behind a glass case.

‘By the way, Othmar, have you not a villa here?’ she said, suddenly remembering the fact. ‘I believe you have five hundred and fifty-five houses altogether, have you not? Is there not some place near Nice that belongs to you?’

‘S. Pharamond? Yes. It is where I slept last night. My father bought some olive and pine wood and built the house in the midst of them. It has a fine view seaward.’

‘Then we shall be neighbours?’

‘If I do not go to Paris.’

‘Of course you will go to Paris, but you will go one day and come back another, like everybody else at this season; though, to be sure, I dare say you are longing for the smell of the asphalte after a cycle of Cathay?’

‘No; the asphalte is not necessary to me. It is more monotonous, on the whole, than the desert.’

‘Ah! you were never a Parisien parisiennant; you were always in revolt against something or another, though one never could understand very well what. When you condescended to our amusements, it was with the air of a man who, to please a child, plays with tin soldiers; that sort of air of contemptuous condescension has made you many enemies. There is nothing makes the world so angry as indifference to what it thinks delightful.’

‘You have offended it in that way yourself, Princess.’

‘Often; but not quite with your insolence. A man who prefers his library to the clubs is beyond all pardon; and, besides, I am seen everywhere where it is worth while to be seen; you are—or were—generally conspicuous by your absence.’

‘I imagine the world has grown as indifferent to me as I am to it, and having forgotten has so forgiven me. I have been away eighteen months.’

‘The world never forgets its rich men, my dear Othmar. It may forget its great ones. Will forget them, indeed, unless they have a drum beaten very loudly before them. You might be great, I think, if you liked; you have so many talents, so much power.’

‘I might buy a kingdom the size of Morocco or Montenegro? Very likely: such sovereignty does not attract me.’

‘Of course I do not mean that: you do not want to be a Prince Floristan; you do not love the race of princes well enough. But were I you I should set some great ambition before me.’

‘Pardon me; you would do no such thing if you were in my position. You would feel, as I feel, the numbing influence of what you called just now the “blank wall of ingots.” When you can buy men you do not estimate them highly enough either to serve or rule them. I have all I can possibly want—materially. I have no reason to seek anything.’

‘Why do English nobles enter public life? They want nothing, materially, either. Some of them are of rank, also, so high in place that nothing can be added to their position.’

‘God knows why they do,’ said Othmar, ‘except that I think the Englishman is an animal like the beaver, not happy without work. Besides, I think they imagine that they serve their country, a delusion, but an honourable one, which must make them very happy. As I have no country I cannot be attached to it.’

‘You could choose one; you are allied to several.’

‘That would not be the same thing. To adore the motherland one must have known no arms, no hearts but hers; no country is more than a stepmother to me.’

‘You are a very much envied man, Othmar, but you are not a happy man.’

He looked her straight in the eyes.

‘I have been unhappy, but I have conquered my folly. It is ingratitude to fate to be wretched while one has health and strength and no material cares to contend with.’

‘All the same, you are not happy now,’ she thought, but she said, with her sweetest smile, ‘You admit that you have all you want materially; all the rest is a dream, not worth keeping awake about for one hour. By the way, as you speak of countries—you are French now by law, I think?’

‘My grandfather was naturalised for his own interests, as you know; but our people were Croat peasants.’

‘I know I have heard you always say so; but I believe it is a fable. You do not come from any peasantry; besides, surely Sclavonia is old enough and dim enough to give you any mystical heroic ancestry you may prefer.’

‘They might be robbers,’ said Othmar, ‘I do not know. There is not much to choose.’

‘Everybody who is noble comes from robbers of some sort,’ said Princess Napraxine; ‘what were the Hohenstauffen, the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg, the Grimaldi, the Montefeltro, the Colonna? Robbers all, sitting on high in their fortresses, and swooping down like hawks on the fords, on the highways, on the moorlands, on the forests, on the little towns below them. You may be quite sure that is what your people did in Croatia.’

‘You are very kind to try and console me,’ said Othmar. ‘Nobility, I think, consists in being able to trace the past of your forefathers and to have your charters; the past of mine is lost in darkness, and my charters are lost with them. Truthfully we can only date from 1767, when Marc Othmar, who dealt in horses, began to lend money in Agram. It is not a lofty beginning; it is not even a creditable one. But I do not think that to pretend that Marc Othmar, the horse dealer or horse stealer, was a hero and saint would mend matters. I accept him as what he was, but I cannot be proud of him; even sometimes I am on the eve of cursing him; at all events, of wishing he had never existed.’

‘My dear Othmar, you are very strange sometimes——’

‘Am I? One is never content with what one has. There is nothing strange in that. If you will deign to remember me at all, you will remember that I was never pleased with being the head of the house of Othmar; I would give all its millions for an unblemished descent.’

‘Then you are ungrateful to your fortunes, and do not understand your own times.’

‘Perhaps I understand them too well, and that is why I despise what they over-estimate.’

‘And over-estimate yourself what they have found worth but little. Look at most of our contemporaries and associates. Have their unblemished names served them in much? How many have remembered that noblesse oblige? How many of them ally themselves with the mud of the earth for the sake of large dowries? how many mortgage their old lands till they have not a sod left which they can call their own? how many waste all their energies and all their health in a routine of miserable and stupid follies which are hardly even to be dignified as vice?’

She spoke with animation; her cheeks had a faint flush, delicate as that of the waxen bells of the begonia flowers, her eyes were full of light. Othmar looked at her with a passion of regret. If only she had loved him, he thought he could have conquered the world, have renewed the impossibilities of Alexander, have done all that visionary boys dream of doing as they read their Euripides or their Æschylus in a summer noon under blossoming lime trees.

‘You will take from Rome what you yourself have carried there,’ says a German writer, and it is with love the same thing; you take from it what you carry to it, you get out of it so much spirituality, and no more, than you bear thereto. To others Nadine Napraxine was a coquette, a mondaine, a mere ÉlÉgante of the elegant world; but to him she was the one woman of the earth; she could have inspired him with any heroism, she could have moved him to any sacrifice, she could have compensated him for any loss; he saw in her a million possibilities which no one ever saw, which might be only the fruits of his imagination, but yet were wholly real to him, unspeakably lovely and attractive. She had offended him, alienated him, treated his ardour and his earnestness as a baby treats its toys, and his reason condemned her inexorably and often; yet she was the one woman on earth for him, and he had tried to hate her, to drive her out of his memory, and had thought that he succeeded, and had only failed.

‘If you were like other men of your generation,’ she pursued, ‘you would be much more content. You do not care for any of the things which fill up their time. You have magnificent horses, but you never race with them, you never even hunt. You care nothing for cards, or for any games of hazard. You do not shoot except, as you justly observed, a fellow-creature now and then when he provokes you. You do not care to have yourself talked about, which is the supreme felicity of the age you live in; your solitary extravagance is to have operas and concerts given in your own houses with closed doors, like Ludwig of Bavaria, and that seems rather an eccentricity than an extravagance to the world at large. You are a great student, but you care about the contents of your books, not about the binding or the date of their edition, so that you never commit the follies of a bibliophile. You do not care about any of your fine places; you have an idea that you would like a cottage just because you are tired of palaces. You vex women by your indifference to their attractions, and men by your indifference to their pursuits. Because circumstance has made you a conspicuous person with an electric light always upon you, you sigh to be an homme d’intÉrieur, with no light on you at all except that of your own hearth. It is Louis Seize and the locksmith, Domitian and the cabbage-garden, Honorius and the hens, over again. History always repeats itself, and how one wishes that it did not!’

‘I am flattered, Madame, that you deign to draw my portrait, since it shows that you have not wholly forgotten my features,’ said Othmar, with some bitterness. ‘At present I have not discovered the hen, the cabbages, or the keys that will make life worth living to me. No doubt the fault lies with myself.’

‘I think you have not the dramatic instinct which alone makes life interesting,’ replied Nadine Napraxine. ‘You do not divert yourself with the faults, the follies, and the meannesses of men; you sigh over them, and your regret is so poignant that it prevents your seeing how infinitely droll their blunders are in reality.’

‘I think,’ she continued, ‘that there are only two ways of looking on life which make it interesting, or even endurable. The one is the way of Corot, which adores Nature, and can find an absolute ecstasy in the sound of the wind and the play of the sunshine, and asks nothing more of fate than a mill-stream and a handful of green leaves. The other is the way of Rochefoucauld and of St. Simon, which finds infinite and unending diversion in watching the feebleness and the mistakes of human nature, which regards the world with what I call the dramatic instinct, and amuses itself endlessly with the attitudes and genuflections of its courtiers, the false phrases and the balked calculations. Now, though you are a very clever man, my dear Othmar, you cannot be put in either of these categories. You know too much of the world for the first, and you have too much softness of heart for the second. Now, were you like Baron Fritz——’

‘My uncle is the one perfectly happy man that I have ever known,’ replied Othmar. ‘It is because he is the most perfect of egotists. According to him the sun shines only for the Othmar, as Joshua fancied it only shone for the Israelites.’

‘It is not only that,’ she said, ‘it is because he has the dramatic instinct. He sees the dramatic side to all that he does; suppliant monarchs, bankrupt statesmen, intriguing diplomatists; men who carry him schemes to tunnel the earth from pole to pole, and great ladies who want him to lend them money on their family diamonds; they are all so many comedians in the eyes of Baron Fritz. He pulls their strings and makes them dance at his pleasure. I quite understand how the whole comedy amuses him so greatly that he can never be conscious of a moment of ennui. It is a great pity that you are not like that. You would leave such witty memoirs!—for you can be witty,—or you would be if you were not always so melancholy.’

‘I regret, Madame,’ said Othmar, ‘that I cannot alter the manner of my life even to have the honour of amusing you after my death!’

Across the bows of the ‘Zostera’ at that moment there passed, perilously near, one of the lateen-sailed boats so common on the coast, with their freights of fruits, of fish, of olives, or of market produce. The boat was full of lemons and of oranges, which gleamed like virgin gold in the bright sunshine of the tranquil afternoon. A peasant woman was managing the sail, a young girl was steering.

‘What a beautiful face!’ said Nadine Napraxine, who had a great love of beauty, and the frank acknowledgment of it of a woman high above all possibilities of envy.

Othmar looked where she pointed.

‘A very lovely face,’ he said indifferently.

‘She does not look like a peasant,’ continued Mme. Napraxine; ‘that little grey gown speaks of some convent. She steers well, for they were terribly near. Who is that very pretty child, Monsignore? I suppose you know all the flock of which you are given the winter shepherding.’

‘Pray do not make me responsible for all the black sheep of these shores,’ said Melville, drawing near and looking at the boat, which was going slowly and heavily against the wind, and labouring under a weighty load. He said as he did so, with a little surprise:

‘Why, that is Yseulte de Valogne!’

‘Yseulte de Valogne! What a name of the Romaunt de la Rose and black-letter Chronicles! Pray who may she be, may I ask?’

‘They call her here Cendrillon,’ said Melville, a little sadly. ‘As for her name, the de Valogne belong to French history; surely you remember to have heard of some of them? Aymar, who fell at the combat of the Thirty; and AdhÉmar, who was Constable of France under Louis XII.; and Maximin, who was a general under CondÉ; and Gui, who was ruined by his display at Versailles, a Colonel of the Guard and a great officer of State. The family is as historic as the Louvre itself, but the poor child is literally sans le sou.’

‘So that she is reduced to sell oranges?’ said Nadine. ‘How very touching! Othmar will purchase immediately several bales.’

‘No, she does not sell oranges,’ said Melville, ‘but perhaps she is more to be pitied than those who do. A great name and no dower—it is to have silver bells to your shoes but no stockings inside them.’

‘Surely she must have stockings, I mean relations?’

‘Only very distant ones. She is a far-off cousin of your friend and neighbour the Duchesse de Vannes, who brings her up; that is, sends her to her convent, pays for her frocks, and allows her to pass her holidays at one of de Vannes’ country-houses. I do not know that we could reasonably expect the Duchesse to do more, only there are two ways of doing a thing, and she does not do this in the best possible manner.’

‘Cri-Cri cannot love a very pretty girl of sixteen, it would not be in nature, certainly not in her nature,’ said the Princess, with one of her moments of frankness. ‘I imagine they will make her embrace the religious life; what else can they do with her?’

‘It is what they will probably end with,’ said Melville, with a tinge of sadness. ‘It is hard for a girl of noble blood and no dower to end otherwise in France. The men who ought to marry her, her equals, will marry instead some Americans with dollars, whose fathers were stokers or pork-butchers.’

‘But are there no other de Valogne?’

‘None; she is the last of a family which was as extravagant as it was distinguished. Othmar may have heard of her father, the last Comte de Valogne; he was a viveur enragÉ, and finished the little that had been left by Count Gui, the hero of Versailles, and the fortune of his wife as well, who was a De Creusac. She died in childbed. Her mother had the care of the child, and he went on with his life of pleasure until he broke his neck riding at La Marche. The old Marquise de Creusac, when she also died, could not leave her granddaughter a farthing. The de Creusac had been ruined in the Revolution, and the sons of the Marquise, who would never have anything to do with their brother-in-law, were both killed in the war of ‘70. There was no one left but the Duchesse de Vannes, who was a third cousin of de Valogne, to do anything. She took the child in her charge, as I have said, and has behaved admirably, in the letter of charity, if something has been lacking of the spirit. So long as the girl is being educated the thing is easy; but when the time comes when she must leave her convent, as she will have to do in two years’ time, the problem will not be so easy of solution; they will have to decide on her future; at present her fate has been easily settled, but soon the terrible question will arise,—who will marry her without a dower? I believe they mean to make her enter the religious life, as you said; for the men who probably would marry her for sake of alliance with the de Vannes, will be those with whom the de Vannes would utterly refuse to ally themselves.’

‘A convent! Good heavens, for a child like a Greuze picture!’ exclaimed Othmar.

Melville added sadly:

‘It is a refuge; but myself, I would never have the religious life embraced only for its safety. I never approve of looking at Deity as a superior sort of chaperon. If all the soul be not aspirant of its own accord to a spiritual sacrifice the vows are a mere shibboleth.’

‘What soul shrined in a healthy body would aspire to the cloister at sixteen?’ thought Othmar, as the Princess said, ‘All this is very interesting, Monsignore, but it does not explain how a protÉgÉe of my neighbours, the high and mighty de Vannes, comes to be rowing in a boat full of oranges.’

‘Ah, that I cannot tell you,’ said Melville, ‘but I believe her foster-mother has a bastide near Nice; it may be she is with her foster-mother now. I knew her well when she was a little child, living with the old Marquise de Creusac in that extreme but refined and reserved poverty of which only the old noblesse has the secret. The Marquise was one of the sweetest and most pious women I have ever had the honour to know; but she could, if necessary, have withered a king into the earth with a glance. The child promised to be like her, but had something bouillante and impetuous, which had come to her from her father, and which, beneath her high-bred manner and her chastened tone, made her, as a baby, intensely interesting.’

‘Dear Monsignore,’ said the Princess, with a little impatience, ‘surely you have mistaken your vocation, and should have been a writer of novels; you draw portraits with the skill of Octave Feuillet.’

‘I have only said what I have seen,’ said Melville, good-humouredly. ‘Probably Feuillet only does the same.’

The boat with the oranges had passed ahead towards the shore, its Venetian red side was dipping in the trough of the waves, its old striped sail was swaying in the wind; there was a speck of gold in the sun where the oranges were.

‘You had better rescue this distressed damsel and marry her, Othmar!’ said the Princess Napraxine, with an unkind little laugh. ‘She seems made on purpose for you. She has the unsullied descent which you are always sighing for, and you certainly can dispense with a dot.’

For answer he only looked at her; but she understood his answer.

Melville vaguely understood also that in his innocent praises of his Cinderella he had unwittingly struck a false chord, and he was too much a man of the world not to be grieved at his involuntary failure in tact. The boat meanwhile was fast growing to a mere speck of red and yellow colour, soon to be wholly lost in the blue radiance of sea and sky.

‘You have at times bought some Greuzes, if I remember,’ continued the Princess. ‘They are pretty, soft, conventional, but I do not know that your gallery is much the richer for them.’

‘They belong to another time than ours,’ said Othmar. ‘I imagine Talleyrand was right when he said that no one born since ‘89 can know how sweet human life can become.’

‘And how elegant human manners can be,’ added Melville. ‘Cendrillon has something of that old grace; when she was two years old she curtseyed as though she were SevignÉ’s self.’

‘What a paragon!’ said Madame Napraxine. ‘Poverty and all the Graces! An irresistible combination. The time I should have liked to live in would have been Louis Treize’s; what perfect costume, what picturesque wars, what admirable architecture! Is this child at SacrÉ Coeur, did you say, Monsignore?’

‘That would be too extravagant for her place as Cendrillon,’ replied Melville. ‘No; I think they were wise not to put her amidst all those great ladies in embryo; she has been educated by the Dames de Ste. Anne, at a remote village called FaiËl in the Morbihan. She has had a pale girlhood there, like the arum-lily that blossoms under the moss-grown oaks.’

‘How poetic you are!’ said the Princess Napraxine, with a smile which brought a flush of embarrassment even to the world-bronzed cheek of Melville. ‘Men are so much more romantic than women. Here are Clotilde de Vannes and I, who only see that, as this young girl has no dower, the very best place for her in the world is a convent, melancholy but inevitable; whereas you and Othmar, merely because she has pretty hair which the sun shines on as she goes past amongst her oranges, are already thinking that some one ought to rise out of the sea to marry her, with a duke’s couronne in one hand and a veil of old d’AlenÇon lace in the other! Certainly those things do happen. If she were an impudent ÉcuyÈre at Hengler’s, or a Californian who never had a grandfather, the duke’s couronne would no doubt appear on her horizon. By the way, pending her eternal retreat, does Cri-Cri allow her to be seen at all?’

‘You will probably see her at Millo. I saw her there last week, and made her cry by reminding her of her babyhood on the isle; and of her grandmother, whom she adored. She is with the Duchesse now, because there is typhus fever at the convent, and the pupils are all dispersed; but Millo is scarcely a congenial air for a poor relation, who is also a proud one.’

‘Ah! she is a good advertisement of Cri-Cri’s virtues, elle en a besoin,’ said the Princess Napraxine, with her merciless little laugh. ‘And de Vannes, what does he say to so pretty a relative?’

‘A man like de Vannes never sees that a young girl of that type exists.’

‘Hum—m—mph!’ she murmured dubiously. ‘That depends on a great many circumstances. Propinquity and ennui will make Ste. Scholastique herself sought like the Krauss or Jeanne Granier. Millo is certainly a very odd kind of home for your woodland arum-lily. If she have any intelligence at all, and relate what she sees when she gets back to FaiËl, the good Dames de Ste. Anne will have the monastic enjoyment of scandal gratified to the uttermost.’

‘I believe she lives entirely in the schoolroom whilst at Millo,’ said Melville, a little impatiently. He wished he had never spoken the name of Yseulte de Valogne, the name which seemed to belong to le temps quand la Reine Berthe fila. He had one of those instincts of having spoken unwisely, one of those presentiments of impending disaster, which come to finely organised and much-experienced minds, and are called by blunter and slower brains mere nervous nonsense.

When the other day the tall factory chimney fell at Bradford, the birds which built in it had flown away before the workmen—stupidly eating their breakfasts till the bricks tumbled about their ears—had looked up and seen any danger.