Countess Mattini, a diamond necklace. It is all quite
regular. I played fair." The Colonel had stopped in his
walk, and had been peering eagerly down the leafy path through
the garden. "Is that not Zara coming now?" he asked. "Look,
your eyes are better than mine."

Barrat rose quickly, and the two men walked forward, and
bowed with the easy courtesy of old comrades to a tall, fair
girl who came hurriedly up the steps. The Countess Zara was a
young woman, but one who had stood so long on guard against
the world, that the strain had told, and her eyes were hard
and untrustful, so that she looked much older than she really
was. Her life was of two parts. There was little to be told
of the first part; she was an English girl who had come from a
manufacturing town to study art and live alone in Paris, where
she had been too indolent to work, and too brilliant to remain
long without companions eager for her society. Through them
and the stories of her wit and her beauty, she had come to
know the King of Messina, and with that meeting the second
part of her life began; for she had found something so
attractive, either in his title or in the cynical humor of the
man himself, that for the last two years she had followed his
fortunes, and Miss Muriel Winter, art student, had become the
Countess Zara, and an uncrowned queen. She was beautiful,
with great masses of yellow hair and wonderful brown eyes.
Her manner when she spoke seemed to show that she despised the
world and those in it almost as thoroughly as she despised
herself.

On the morning of her return from Messina, she wore a blue