said, meeting her intently questioning
gaze.

"You? Oh, you are not like those others over there. Your country is
not at war. You still have leisure to remember. But they forget. They
haven't time to remember anything--anybody--over there. Don't you
think so?" She turned in her chair unconsciously, and gazed eastward.
"--They have forgotten me over there--" And her lips tightened,
contracted, bitten into silence.

The strange beauty of the girl left him dumb. He was recalling, now,
all that he had ever heard concerning her. The gossip of Europe had
informed him that, though Nihla Quellen was passionately and devotedly
French in soul and heart, her mother had been one of those unmoral and
lovely Georgians, and her father an Alsatian, named Dunois--a French
officer who entered the Russian service ultimately, and became a
hunting cheetah for the Grand Duke Cyril, until himself hunted into
another world by that old bag of bones on the pale and shaky nag. His
daughter took the name of Nihla Quellen and what money was left, and
made her debut in Constantinople.

As the young fellow sat there watching her, all the petty gossip of
Europe came back to him--anecdotes, panegyrics, eulogies, scandals,
stage chatter, Quarter "divers," paid reclames--all that he had ever
read and heard about this notorious young girl, now seated there
across the table, with her pretty head framed by slender, unjewelled
fingers. He remembered the gems she had worn that June night, a year
ago, and their magnificence.

"Well," she said, "life is a pleasantry, a jest, a bon-mot flung over
his shoulder by some god too drunk with nectar to invent a better
joke. Life is an Olympian epigram made between immortal yawns. What do
you think of _my_ epigram, Garry?"

"I think you are just as clever and amusing as I remember you,
Nihla."

"Amusing to _you_, perhaps. But I don't entertain myself very
successfully. I don't think poverty is a very funny joke. Do you?"

"Poverty!" he repeated, smiling his unbelief.

She smiled too, displayed her pretty, ringless hands humorously, for
his inspection, then framed her oval face between them again and made
a deliberate grimace.

"All gone," she said. "I am, as you say, here on my uppers."

"I can't understand, Nihla----"

"Don't try to. It doesn't concern you. Also, please forget me as Nihla
Quellen. I told you that I've taken my sister's name, Thessalie
Dunois."

"But all Europe knows you as Nihla Quell