When her husband and her guests came downstairs at one o’clock, they found the Princess Nadine looking her loveliest.

‘Oh, you lazy people!’ she cried to them. ‘Are you any the better for sleeping like that? Look at me. I have been swimming half an hour; I have dictated twenty letters; I have scolded the gardeners, and I have seen three boxes from Worth unpacked; it is only one o’clock, and I can already feel as good a conscience as Titus. I have already saved my day.’

‘I daresay you have only been doing mischief,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘I should like to see the letters before I judge of the excellence of your actions.’

‘Anyone might see the letters; they are all orders, or invitations, or refusals of invitations; quite stupid, but very useful; epistolary omnibus horses driven by the secretary. When I had done with them, I had my half hour’s swim. What nonsense the doctors talk about not swimming in winter: the chill of the water is delicious. In summer one always fancies the sea has been boiled. Platon, if you had not gone to bed, you would have seen your friend Othmar. He was here for half an hour.’

‘Othmar!’ exclaimed the Prince. ‘Here at that time of the morning?’

‘He does not want to go to sleep,’ she retorted. ‘He had his chocolate with me, and then rowed himself back to S. Pharamond and Baron Fritz.’

Lady Brancepeth glanced at her.

‘You have certainly done a great deal, Nadine, while we have been only dozing,’ she said drily. The Princess looked at her good-humouredly, with her little dubious smile.

‘There is always something to do if one only look for it. You feel so satisfied with yourself too when you have been useful before one o’clock.’

‘Othmar!’ repeated the Prince. ‘If I had known, I would have come downstairs.’

‘My dear Platon, you would have done nothing of the kind; you would have sworn at your man for disturbing you, and would have turned round and gone to sleep again. Besides, what do you want with Othmar? You do not care about “getting on a good thing,” nor even about suggesting a loan for Odessa.’

‘I like Othmar,’ said Napraxine with perfect sincerity. His wife looked at him, with her little dubious smile. ‘It is always so with them,’ she thought. ‘They always like just the one man of all others——!’

‘I suppose, if I had done quite what I ought, I should have asked Othmar to “put me on” something,’ she said aloud. ‘It is not every day that one has one of the masters of the world all alone at eight o’clock in the morning.’

‘The masters of the world always find their Cleopatras,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘At La Jacquemerille, perhaps, as well as in Egypt.’

‘Cleopatra must have been a very stupid woman,’ said Nadine Napraxine, ‘to be able to think of nothing but that asp!’

‘I do not know that it was so very stupid; it was a good rÉclame. It has sent her name down to us.’

‘Anthony alone would have done that. A woman lives by her lovers. Who would have heard of HÉloÏse, of Beatrice, of Leonora d’Este?——’

‘You are very modest for us. Perhaps without the women the men might never have been immortal.’

‘I cannot think why you sent Othmar away,’ repeated Prince Napraxine. ‘I wanted especially to know if they take up the Russian loan——’

‘I did not send him away, he went,’ replied his wife, with a little smile; ‘and you know he will never allow anyone to talk finance to him.’

‘That is very absurd. He cannot deny that his House lives by finance.’

‘He would certainly never deny it, but he dislikes the fact; you cannot force it on him, my dear Platon, in the course of breakfast chit-chat. I am sure your manners are better than that. Besides, if you did commit such a rudeness, you would get nothing by it. I believe he never tells a falsehood, but he will never tell the truth unless he chooses. And I suppose, too, that financiers are like cabinet ministers—they have a right to lie if they like.’

‘I am sure Othmar does not lie,’ said Napraxine.

‘I dare say he is as truthful as most men of the world. Truth is not a social virtue; tact is a much more amiable quality. Truth says to one, ‘You have not a good feature in your face;’ tact says to one, ‘You have an exquisite expression.’ Perhaps both facts are equally true; but the one only sees what is unpleasant, the other only sees what is agreeable. There can be no question which is the pleasanter companion.’

‘Othmar has admirable tact——’

‘How your mind runs upon Othmar! Kings generally acquire a great deal of tact from the obligation to say something agreeable to so many strangers all their lives. He is a kind of king in his way. He has learnt the kings’ art of saying a few phrases charmingly with all his thoughts elsewhere. It is creditable to him, for he has no need to be popular, he is so rich.’

‘Ask him to dinner to-morrow or Sunday.’

‘If you wish. But he will not come; he dislikes dinners as much as I do. It is the most barbarous method of seeing one’s friends.’

‘There is no other so genial.’

She rose with a little shrug of her shoulders. She seldom honoured Napraxine by conversing so long with him.

‘Order the horses, Ralph,’ she said to Lord Geraldine; ‘I want a long gallop.’

‘She has had some decisive scene with Othmar,’ thought Lady Brancepeth, ‘and she is out of humour; she always rides like a Don Kossack when she is irritated.’

‘There is no real riding here,’ said the Princess, as she went to put on her habit. ‘One almost loves Russia when one thinks of the way one can ride there; of those green eternal steppes, those illimitable plains, with no limit but the dim grey horizon, your black Ukrane horse, bounding like a deer, flying like a zephyr; it is worth while to remain in Russia to gallop so, on a midsummer night, with not a wall or a fence all the way between you and the Caspian Sea. I think if I were always in Russia I should become such a poet as MaÏkoff: those immense distances are inspiration.’

She rode with exquisite grace and spirit; an old Kossack had taught her, as a child, the joys of the saddle, on those lonely and dreamful plains, which had always held since a certain place in her heart. That latent energy and daring, which found no scope in the life of the world, made her find pleasure in the strong stride of the horse beneath her, in the cleaving of the air at topmost speed. The most indolent of mondaines at all other times, when she sprang into the saddle as lightly as a bird on a bough, she was transformed; her slender hands had a grip of steel, her delicate face flushed with pleasure, the fiery soul of her fathers woke in her—of the men who had ridden out with their troopers to hunt down the Persian and the Circassian; who had swept like storm-clouds over those shadowy steppes which she loved; who had had their part or share in all the tragic annals of Russia; who had slain their foes at the steps of the throne, in the holiness of the cloister; who had been amongst those whose swords had found the heart of Cathrine’s son, and whose voices had cried to the people in the winter’s morning, ‘Paul, the son of Peter, is dead; pray for his soul!’ If she were cruel—now and then—was it not in her blood?

Meanwhile Yseulte was helping her foster-mother to pack tea-roses, to go to England for a great ball, in their little hermetically-sealed boxes. The roses were not wholly opened before they were thus shut away from light and air into darkness. They would not wither in their airless cells, but they would pale a little in that dull sad voyage from the sunshine to the frost and fog. As she laid the rosebuds,—pink, white, and pale yellow,—one by one on their beds of moss, she thought for the first time wistfully that her fate was very like theirs; only the rosebuds, perhaps, when they should be taken out of their prisons at their journey’s end, though they would have but a very few hours of life before them, yet would bloom a little, if mournfully, in the northern land, and see the light again, if only for a day. But her life would be shut into silence and darkness for ever; she would not even live the rose’s life ‘l’espace d’un matin.’