Nadine Napraxine had just quitted her bathroom, and was taking her chocolate, when her women, vaguely frightened and so venturing to disobey her, brought her word that Prince EzarhÉdine begged to see her for a few moments on an urgent matter. It was noon. She was never visible until three in the daytime in Paris. She was at first indignant at such an insolence, then made curious by such an intrusion. EzarhÉdine had been one of her husband’s familiar associates, but he had never been an intimate friend of her own.

‘What can he want?’ she said irritably. ‘Send M. Valisoff to him.’

Valisoff was her own secretary.

But when her servants insisted, contrary to all their usual timid obedience to her rules, her inquisitiveness was excited; she consented to receive the unbidden and ill-timed visit. She cast about her a loose gown of cream-hued China crape, embroidered with pansies and primroses, put her feet into slippers which were embroidered like it, and with her beautiful arms seen through the loose sleeves, and her eyes still suffused with the languor of her morning sleep, she passed out into the small salon adjoining her dressing-chamber.

Prince EzarhÉdine, ushered in there, bowed to the ground, and then stood looking at her strangely. He was very pale, and there was a tremor about his mouth.

‘Madame,’ he murmured, and then paused; his voice could not be commanded.

She, with her wonderful and instantaneous penetration into the minds of those who spoke to her, divined his mission in that one moment in which his eyes met hers. She went a step nearer to him, herself looking like some Aurora of the Italian painters, with her white floating flower-embroidered robes and her loose hair bound by an amethyst-hued ribbon.

‘What have you come to tell me?’ she said, in a strange, low voice. ‘Is my husband—dead?’

EzarhÉdine bowed in silence.

She shuddered slightly from head to foot; her eyes opened wide with an expression of great terror; her lips turned white. She sat down on the nearest seat, and motioned to him to be seated by her.

‘Has he fought with Othmar?’ she said hoarsely, so low that her words were scarcely intelligible.

‘With Othmar? No, madame,’ EzarhÉdine answered in surprise; and told her with whom he had fought and how he had died.

She heard in perfect silence; but the colour had returned to her lips.

‘Poor Napraxine; he died for her sake, and it is only of Othmar that she thought,’ mused Prince EzarhÉdine as he left her house when his painful mission was over.