The secretary gathered up his papers, his quills, and his inkhorn,
and went his way, accounting the end of the world at hand.

When the door had closed upon him, the Seneschal, with another bow
and a simper, placed a chair at his visitor's disposal. She looked
at the chair, then looked at the man much as she had looked at the
chair, and turning her back contemptuously on both, she sauntered
towards the fireplace. She stood before the blaze, with her whip
tucked under her arm, drawing off her stout riding-gloves. She was
a tall, splendidly proportioned woman, of a superb beauty of
countenance, for all that she was well past the spring of life.

In the waning light of that October afternoon none would have
guessed her age to be so much as thirty, though in the sunlight
you might have set it at a little more. But in no light at all
would you have guessed the truth, that her next would be her
forty-second birthday. Her face was pale, of an ivory pallor that
gleamed in sharp contrast with the ebony of her lustrous hair.
Under the long lashes of low lids a pair of eyes black and insolent
set off the haughty lines of her scarlet lips. Her nose was thin
and straight, her neck an ivory pillar splendidly upright upon her
handsome shoulders.

She was dressed for riding, in a gown of sapphire velvet, handsomely
laced in gold across the stomacher, and surmounted at the neck,
where it was cut low and square, by the starched band of fine linen
which in France was already replacing the more elaborate ruff. On
her head, over a linen coif, she wore a tall-crowned grey beaver,
swathed with a scarf of blue and gold.