darkest eyes under long golden eyebrows in all the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She was seated, like a saint at God’s right hand, at the right hand of the Comte de Ravila, the God of the Feast, a god that, for the moment, waived his right to use his enemies as his footstool; slender and spiritual, like an arabesque and a fairy, in her dress of green velvet, with glints of silver, the long train twining round her chair, no bad imitation of the serpent’s tail in which the alluring shape of the sea-nymph Melusina terminates.

‘A happy thought!’ put in the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, seconding as mistress of the house the wish expressed by the duchess. ‘Yes! the love of all loves, inspired or felt, you would most gladly live again, were such a thing possible.’

‘Oh, I would be glad to live them all again!’ cried Ravila, with the unquenchable gusto of a Roman Emperor, the insatiable craving your utterly blasé man of pleasure sometimes retains. And he flourished aloft his champagne glass, the glass our fathers drank from, tall and slender, and called by them a flûte, mayhap from the celestial harmonies in which it often bathes our heart! Then he embraced in one sweeping look the whole circle of fair women that wreathed the board so royally. ‘And still,’ he went on, replacing his glass before him with a sigh that sounded strange from such a Nebuchadnezzar, whose only experience as yet of the grass of the field as an article of diet had been the tarragon salads at the Café Anglais—‘and still, how true it is there is always one among all the emotions of a lifetime that shines ever in the memory more brightly than the rest, as life advances—one for which we would gladly exchange them all.’

‘The brightest diamond of the casket,’ murmured the Comtesse Chiffrevas in a dreamy tone, perhaps looking back at the sparkling facets of her own career.

‘…The legends of my country,’ broke in the Princess Jable—who is from the foothills of the Ural Mountains—‘tell of a famous and fabulous diamond, rose-coloured at first, but which turns black presently, yet remains a true diamond all the time, and sparkles the more brilliantly for the change.…’ She said it with the strange exotic charm peculiar to her, this Gipsy Princess. For a true gipsy she is, married for love by the handsomest prince of all the exiled Polish nobility; yet having as much the air of a high-born princess as if she had first seen the light in the palace of the Jagellons.

A regular explosion followed. ‘Yes! yes!’ they clamoured with one voice. ‘Tell us, comte!’ they urged in tone already vibrating with a passionate supplication, curiosity quivering in the very curls that fringed the back of their necks. They drew together, shoulder to shoulder; some with cheek on hand and elbow on the board, some leaning back in their chairs, with open fans before their mouths, all challenging him with wide inquisitive eyes.

‘If you are bent on hearing the story,’ said the comte with the nonchalance of a man well aware how much procrastination adds to the keenness of desire.

‘We are, we are!’ cried the duchesse, gazing, as a Turkish despot might at his sabre’s edge, at the gold dessert-knife she held in her fingers.

‘Well, listen then,’ he said finally, still the same fine air of indifference.

They fell into attitudes of profound attention, and, fixing their gaze on his face, devoured him with their eyes. Every love story is interesting to a woman; but here, perhaps—who knows?—the chief charm lay for each one of his audience in the thought that the tale he was about to unfold might be her own.…They knew him to be too much of a gentleman and too well-bred not to be sure he would suppress all names and, where necessary, slur over indiscreet details; and their conviction of this fact made them so much the more eager to hear the story. They not only desired but, what is more, they hoped—each for a special and particular sop to her own vanity.

Yet this same vanity was on the qui vive to scent a rival in this reminiscence called up as the tenderest in a life that must have been so full of them. The old sultan was going once more to throw the handkerchief…that