"Dear Fulke! You are such a naughty boy! You shouldn't make such
remarks before Lady Lyle. She never says anything against anyone!"

"Dear Fulke" stared. Had he given vent to his feelings he would
have exclaimed: "Oh, Lord!--isn't the old lady a deep one!" But as
it was he attended to his young moustache anxiously and remained
silent. Lady Chetwynd Lyle meanwhile flushed with annoyance; she
felt that Lady Fulkeward's remark was sarcastic, but she could not
very well resent it, seeing that Lady Fulkeward was a peeress of
the realm, and that she herself, by the strict laws of heraldry,
was truly only "Dame" Chetwynd Lyle, as wife of an ordinary
knight, and had no business to be called "her ladyship" at all.

"I should, indeed, be sorry," she said, primly, "if I were
mistaken in my private estimate of the Princess Ziska's character,
but I must believe my own eyes and the evidence of my own senses,
and surely no one can condone the extremely fast way in which she
behaved with that new man--that French artist, Armand Gervase--
last night. Why, she danced six times with him! And she actually
allowed him to walk home with her through the streets of Cairo!
They went off together, in their fancy dresses, just as they were!
I never heard of such a thing!"

"Oh, there was nothing remarkable at all in that," said Lord
Fulkeward. "Everybody went about the place in fancy costume last
night. I went out in my Neapolitan dress with a girl, and I met
Denzil Murray coming down a street just behind here--took him for
a Florentine prince, upon my word! And I bet you Gervase never got
beyond the door of the Princess's palace; for that blessed old
Nubian she keeps--the chap with a face like a mummy--bangs the