nameless suggestions of middle age. Yet she was still a handsome
woman. She knew how to dress, and how to make the best of herself.
She had the foreigner's instinct for clothes, and her figure was
still irreproachable. She sat and looked with a sort of calculating
interest at the man who for years had come as near touching her
heart as any of his sex. Curiously enough she knew that this new
aspect in which he now presented himself, this incipient cowardice--
the first-fruits of weakening nerves--did not and could not affect
her feelings for him. She saw him now almost for the first time with
the mask dropped, no longer cold, cynical and calculating, but a man
moved to his shallow depths by what might well seem to him, a
dweller in the narrow ways of life, as a tragedy. It looked at her
out of his grey eyes. It showed itself in the twitching of his lips.
For many years he had lived upon a little less than nothing a year.
Now for the first time his means of livelihood were threatened. His
long-suffering acquaintances had left him alone at the card-table.

"You disappoint me, Nigel," she said. "I hate to see a man weaken.
There is nothing against you. Don't act as though there could be. As
to this little house-party you were speaking of, I only wish I could
think of something to help you. By the by, what are you doing to-
night?"

"Nothing," he answered, "except that Engleton is expecting me to
dine with him."

"I have an idea," the Princess said slowly. "It may not come to
anything, but it is worth trying. Have you met my new admirer, Mr.
Cecil de la Borne?"